Jukebox musicals are like cryptocurrency: everyone knows they have no intrinsic value but they keep raking in money anyway. Which is only to say that yes, of course I know not to expect much more from any new example of this form than crass exploitation of boomer nostalgia. The shows usually amount to little more than perky live covers of some bankable back catalogue clumsily couched in a plodding, blandly generic script that grinds away all the star’s inconveniently rough biographical edges. (Think of Tina, A Beautiful Noise, Aint Too Proud, Summer, Ring of Fire, MJ, and Escape to Margaritaville, to name only some recent ones.)
The wrinkle here is that “usually,” because there are exceptions. My memory of them—chiefly Beautiful (about Carole King) and Jersey Boys (about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)—is what got me out to see A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical. Beautiful and Jersey Boys (and maybe a small handful of others) turned the difficult trick of making their famous songs into meaningful and nuanced storytelling tools, and their existence has left me susceptible to hope for the form. I know better, but I keep going.
Another personal matter here is that I played trumpet as a boy, and Armstrong lodged early in my imagination. Before I knew anything about jazz I was deeply struck by his brassy fearlessness, his ease of invention, the way his horn seemed as organic to him as his fascinatingly damaged voice. Much later, when I learned he was controversial because some found his stage act Uncle Tommish, I grew hungry to know more and dipped into some of the biographies. His story is complicated and contradictory: he was a national icon and a scapegoat, a genius and a pawn, an epoch-making artist who changed the course of jazz, blues, and pop, and provoked as much envy and greed as he did love. No entertainer could deserve the attentions of a good dramatist more. Alas, we’ll have a wait a bit longer for that. A Wonderful World is an ordinary, platitudinous, unambitious place-holder.
Now, before anyone gets mad at me, let me acknowledge that this show, directed by Christopher Renshaw with a book by Aurin Squire, contains splendid renditions of several dozen songs that Satchmo made famous. These vibrant, high-stepping numbers actually manage to upstage the flaccid drama at times, and they will no doubt be entertainment enough for some. The actor who plays Armstrong, James Monroe Iglehart, is also a remarkable find—charismatic, vivacious, and so adept at channeling Satchmo’s distinctive head-shakes, mugging, and tires-on-gravel voice he makes them seem wholly spontaneous and natural. The cast is the reason to see the show. All four actresses who play Armstrong’s wives—Dionne Figgins, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Kim Exum, and Darlesia Cearcy—are incandescent soloists powerful enough to steal scenes.
That said, A Wonderful World falls quickly into the dreary rut of jukeboxes: trying to fob off a string of familiar songs as connected storytelling. It recounts Armstrong’s career in four parts, each named for a city he lived in (New Orleans, Chicago, Hollywood, New York), ushering us briskly through bullet-point achievements and experiences without once stopping to fully explain their circumstances, let alone explore their personal or social resonances. We learn, for instance, about: his flight from racist violence in the Jim Crow south; his exploitative Chicago apprenticeship to King Oliver; his “accidental” adoption of scat during an early recording session; his flight from the mob to the movies, which also exploited him; his numerous other confrontations with racism, including a strangely equivocal meeting with Lincoln Perry, the actor of Stepin Fetchit, who seems to assure him that the minstrel-show notes in his act are no big deal (or maybe not?).
It’s disappointing enough to leave all this—and much more—essentially unexplored in the perpetual rush to get to the next song and dance. But it’s positively absurd to apply the same sketchy superficiality to Armstrong’s intimate relationships.
Along with the city tour, the action is also organized around his four marriages, without telling a coherent story about any of them. All the wives are lumped together as blurry versions of the same nagging ball-and-chain holding the great force of nature back from doin what every rambling man’s gotta do. This is so trite and offensive that even the show’s fine acting, singing and dancing can’t distract from it. Around the seventh time his cartoonishly drawn first wife Daisy Parker (Figgins) pulled out a switchblade, I thought of yelling, “Use it on the script!”
Photos: Jeremy Daniel
Book by Aurin Squire
Conceived by Andrew Delaplaine & Christopher Renshaw
Directed by Christopher Renshaw
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