‘Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole’ Review: Dimming a Great Talent

When Nat King Cole performed “The Party’s Over” on his NBC variety show, he did it with a smile, as he seemed to do everything. But the song bitterly resonated on that particular broadcast, Cole’s final outing as a host, having quit after just over a year’s worth of struggles finding national advertisers. “It’s time to wind up / The masquerade,” he sang. “Just make your mind up / The piper must be paid.”

Written by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, the formally ambitious, if muddled, “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole” takes place on that fateful Dec. 17, 1957, when the pianist and singer said goodbye to his audience. (Note that Domingo, who is famous as an actor these days, does not appear in the show.)

The framing device is not unlike that of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is also set in a TV studio, and both shows look at a momentous taping as a mode of resistance against America’s powers-that-be. But “Lights Out” takes a very different tack from the George Clooney and Grant Heslov play’s straightforward embrace of docu-like similitude .

“Some of you thought you were going to get a nice and easy holiday show,” Sammy Davis Jr. (Daniel J. Watts) informs the audiences of both the television studio and New York Theater Workshop, where the production is running. “No! Welcome to the fever dream.” The musical unfurls in the minutes before Cole (Dulé Hill) is supposed to go on the air.

Time dilates and contracts; guests and family members pop up; conversations are interspersed with musical standards. Davis, who had actually guest-starred on Cole’s show a few months earlier, is ever-present here as a flamboyantly extroverted jester who might represent the id of the more restrained (at least publicly) Cole. The pinnacle of McGregor’s production is a fiery tap number, choreographed by Jared Grimes, between the two men that lands halfway between duet and battle, and is set to “Me and My Shadow.”

Juxtaposing an irrepressible scratcher of itches and a debonair charmer as two forces of Black creativity, which the white establishment tried to contain in safe, acceptable boxes, is the show’s best idea. Hill gives it life with a complex, layered performance as Cole, who is revealed to be channeling his anger and frustrations into a smooth, urbane exterior — a review of his show’s premiere in The New York Times described him as having “an amiable personality that comes across engagingly on the television screen.” (Both Hill and Watts were in the “Lights Out” premiere in 2017, with the People’s Light company in Malvern, Penn.)