Jelly’s Last Jam (Play)

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    ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Review: A Musical Paradise, Even in Purgatory

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    Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.That painful history can be alchemized into thrilling entertainment is both the central idea and the takeaway experience of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the jaw-dropping Encores! revival that opened on Wednesday at City Center. Especially in its first act, as it tells the intertwined stories of Jelly Roll Morton and the early years of jazz, it offers up wonder after wonder, in songs and dances so neatly conceived and ferociously performed that in the process of blowing the roof off the building they also make your hair stand on end.It might not be immediately apparent from its strange framework that the musical could produce such an effect. The book, by George C. Wolfe, who also directed the 1992 Broadway original, introduces us to Morton (Nicholas Christopher) at the moment of his death. That’s when he is greeted, in a kind of nightclub limbo, by Chimney Man — so called because this forbidding psychopomp, played by the fascinatingly strict Billy Porter, sweeps souls to their destination. Accompanied by a trio of louche, bespangled “Hunnies,” he first puts Morton through a recap of his life, with an emphasis on his lies, betrayals and musicological self-aggrandizement.Tiffany Mann as Miss Mamie, a local blues singer. One of her powerhouse numbers points Morton on the road north.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many of those lies and betrayals really happened is unclear; most of the musical’s specific situations and supporting characters seem to be inventions or conflations. But the self-aggrandizement is all too real. Morton, not content to be merely a great pianist and composer in the early years of jazz, repeatedly claimed to have “invented” the genre. It is for this sin — a sin against history but also against Blackness — that the show seeks to prosecute him.If only real trials were as entertaining. Morton’s privileged but stifling youth in a wealthy, light-skinned New Orleans family is sketched in a series of numbers that efficiently establish the expectations of the Creole class and his rebellions against it. Like most rebellions, his involve exposure to different kinds of people; when the boy (beautifully played by Alaman Diadhiou) sneaks into the dives and brothels on the Blacker side of town, the sounds of tinkers, ragpickers, beignet men and voodoo vendors, layered and compressed and powerfully polyrhythmic, open his ears to a new kind of music.As presented here, that music is sensationally catchy. (Though mostly Morton’s, it also includes material written by Luther Henderson for the 1992 production.) Somewhat miraculously considering its knottiness, it has been set with lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, that spark and sparkle. In numbers like “The Whole World’s Waitin’ to Sing Your Song,” she weaves scat and slang and classic Broadway wordsmithery (“Slide that sound/Roll that rhythm/Syncopate the street-beat with ’em”) into a multipurpose dramatic net.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Returns, Bringing a Jazz Tale to a New Generation

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      Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he wants audiences at the musical about Jelly Roll Morton to experience “a time period that does not exist anymore.”The team behind the Encores! revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not looking to reinvent George C. Wolfe’s ambitious 1992 Broadway show. But they do hope that this rendition, opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, will introduce the musical to a new generation.Taking that idea a step further, Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he also wanted audiences “to immerse themselves in a joy in a time period that does not exist anymore.”That joy comes via the story of jazz and the works of Jelly Roll Morton, a ragtime pianist who said he invented the genre in 1902. In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Morton is portrayed as a conflicted soul, a mixed-race man of Creole descent whose light hue gives him privilege in his hometown, New Orleans. He rebels against his heritage and soaks in the music of economically disadvantaged Black people, stirring up dissension in his family. He goes out on the road and becomes a well-known musician. Yet as jazz music’s popularity swells, Morton’s impact on it is forgotten. He’s a pioneer but isn’t given proper credit for it.John Clay III and Nicholas Christopher rehearsing last week at New York City Center before the show’s two-week run, which begins Wednesday.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesWhile Morton’s music is the centerpiece here, the show also features lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and additional compositions by Luther Henderson. In his review of the production, which starred Gregory Hines and Savion Glover as the older and younger versions of Morton, the Times critic Frank Rich called the first act “sizzling,” adding, “at once rollicking and excessive, roof-raising and overstuffed, you fly into intermission, high on the sensation that something new and exciting is happening.”The Encores! production features slightly tweaked arrangements by Webb, a Broadway veteran and Tony Award nominee for his orchestrations for “MJ the Musical.” Nicholas Christopher (“Sweeney Todd”) and Alaman Diadhiou take on the older and younger Morton roles, respectively, and other cast members include Billy Porter, Joaquina Kalukango, Leslie Uggams and Okierete Onaodowan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      Coming to City Center: ‘Pal Joey,’ ‘Titanic’ and the 20th Fall for Dance

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      Also among next season’s highlights: Encores! revivals of “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and dance works from Pam Tanowitz and Lyon Opera Ballet.Concert re-stagings of “Titanic,” “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam”; the unveiling of a previously announced rewrite of the Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey”; and dance works by Lyon Opera Ballet and Pam Tanowitz: New York City Center has announced plans for an ambitious 2023-24 season, one in which it will celebrate its 30th Encores! series and the 20th Fall for Dance festival.“It’s a season that’s equal parts hilarity, innovation and operatic scale,” Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, a concert series that revives classic and rare musicals, said on Wednesday in a news release.A highlight will be City Center’s gala presentation: an adaptation of the 1940 musical “Pal Joey” (Nov. 1-5), now set in a Black community — the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s — starring Ephraim Sykes as Joey Evans, a jazz singer who refuses to compromise his craft in the face of racism, and Jennifer Holliday (a Tony winner for “Dreamgirls”) as a nightclub owner. The production, directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover with a new book by Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty, will also feature Aisha Jackson (“Once Upon a One More Time”) and Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”).Frank Sinatra with Rita Hayworth, left, and Kim Novak in the 1957 film adaptation of “Pal Joey.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamyThis is a new direction for “Pal Joey,” which originally featured white characters; in 2021, the producer Jeffrey Richards said he would bring this re-conceived version to Broadway during the 2022-23 season, which just ended without the show. Now the delayed production will have a City Center run instead — and after that, who knows? Two of this season’s Tony-nominated musical revivals, “Into the Woods” and “Parade,” started at City Center.City Center’s season will kick off with its 20th Fall for Dance festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 8), which will include a collaboration between Sara Mearns of City Ballet, the choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, co‐presented with Vail Dance Festival; as well as the premiere of an original work by the street dance artist Ephrat Asherie and the tap dancer Michelle Dorrance. The two-week festival will also include performances by Birmingham Royal Ballet, led by the director Carlos Acosta, and by Bijayini Satpathy, an interpreter of the classical Indian dance form Odissi.In January, the main Encores! series begins with “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 musical comedy adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and a book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer. Sutton Foster (“Anything Goes,” “The Music Man”) stars as the brassy, lovable Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, the part that made Carol Burnett a star in 1959. DeBessonet will direct a new concert adaptation (Jan. 24-28) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”It will be followed by “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 Broadway musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, with a book by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and music by Morton and Luther Henderson (Feb. 21-25). The original production won three Tony Awards, including best lead actor for Gregory Hines and best featured actress for Tonya Pinkins. It will be directed by Robert O’Hara, with casting to be announced.The series will conclude with a revival of Peter Stone and Maury Yeston’s 1997 musical “Titanic,” which recounts the 20th century’s most famous maritime disaster (June 12-16). The original production (no connection to James Cameron’s epic film) won five Tony Awards, including best musical, but has never received a Broadway revival. It will be directed by Anne Kauffman, with casting to be announced.City Center’s 2023-24 lineup also includes over a dozen dance offerings, among them Lyon Opera Ballet in “Dance,” the choreographer Lucinda Childs’s 1979 collaboration with the composer Philip Glass and the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (Oct. 19-21); as well as the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Song of Songs,” which fuses David Lang’s choral settings of the biblical poem with movement inspired by Jewish folk dance (Nov. 9-11).To close out the year, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the center’s resident dance company, will celebrate its 65th anniversary with a season (Nov. 29-Dec. 31) that includes Ronald K. Brown’s “Dancing Spirit,” a 2009 work that mixes African diaspora and American modern dance styles. More