Claire Kolheim – Memphis Flyer

I can’t have been the only person still thinking about Sister Act the Musical long after the angelic voices faded at Playhouse on the Square and all the glittering black-and-white habits were hung up for the night. It’s a thought-provoking piece of theater that raises many questions:

• How many rhymes for genuflect are there?

• What decade is this show set in, again?

• Is there anything Claire Kolheim can’t do?

• Why is it funny when nuns act like normal people?

• What does it mean when authors write comic malaprops like, “incognegro?”

And that’s just for starters.

There’s no denying that the Sister Act movie franchise, and its seemingly inevitable musical adaptation, have a lot of fans who find something genuinely uplifting in the story of Deloris, the hard-partying disco diva who witnesses a mob-style execution performed by her boyfriend and hides out in a convent where she teaches rhythmically challenged nuns how to get funky Philly-style. But Sister Act has always had its share of textual problems too. The Whoopi Goldberg film was originally intended as a vehicle for Bette Midler, and, as New York Times critic Janet Maslin pointed out in her original 1992 review, the pseudonymously credited screenplay is peppered with awkward “Scenes that might have played as mere snobbery with Ms. Midler [but] now have a hint of racism.”

Chris Neely

Soul, hip-hop, and nuns’ habits hit POTS.

Maslin was being generous, and none of the things that gave her pause have been fixed in a stage adaptation that wears its cliches and cultural appropriations like a fur coat and stripper boots. The end result is a sometimes delightful, but mostly disposable Broadway hit that may attract and appeal to fans of the original films, but is unlikely to win over too many new converts.

Director Dave Landis keeps things moving with help from a solid band with a good feel for the musical’s more soulful numbers. Packing marquee performers like Irene Crist, Courtney Oliver, Sally Stover, and Mary Buchignani into the ensemble helps, and for all my complaints, this Sister Act ranks among the tightest and better-acted musical productions in a theater season defined more by ambition than quality.

Sister Act‘s a show that’s made to be stolen by Deloris, and Kolheim is more than up to the challenge. She’s consistently grounded and human in a script that tries its best to turn all of its characters into sight gags. She’s also funny, and it’s no mystery to Memphis audiences what happens when she opens her throat to sing.

At the end of Sunday’s matinee, Kolheim improvised a lyric into the finale. “You were fabulous,” she warbled to the audience. Judging by the warm response, the feeling was mutual.

Marc Gill doesn’t fare quite so well as Deloris’ killer boyfriend, Curtis. But the POTS heavy-hitter has been given the tonally impossible task of remaining dangerous while singing cuddly, self-conscious songs. His goons fare better because they’re never supposed to be anything but clowns, and Daniel Gonzalez’s Barry White-inspired take on “Lady in the Long Black Dress” may be Sister Act‘s most memorable solo performance.

Sister Act‘s score is occasionally aspirational with fat-sounding numbers informed by Philly soul artists like Barbara Mason, Teddy Pendergrass, and the Delfonics. All this AM-radio-inspired goodness is sprinkled in amid self-consciously silly “musical theater” numbers that aren’t quite deliberate enough to parody The Sound of Music. And then, in the middle of it all, there’s the straight gangsta nun rap — an uncomfortable bit that elicits knee-jerk laughter. It’s also weirdly anachronistic for a show that, based on the historic papal visit it mentions and the fact that none of the nuns know what a disco ball is, seems to be set in 1979. At least Stover handles the hippity-hop assignment with Memphis-bred aplomb.

Painterly lighting designs by John Horan splatter across Jimmy Humphries’ fine, illustration-based scenery to make this Sister Act easy on the eyes. Rebecca Powell’s costumes take cues from the script’s John Travolta references and are built to highlight the dancers’ most shakable parts. It’s almost enough to send alert audience members straight to confession.

We Live Here, a co-winner of Playhouse on the Square’s NewWorks@TheWorks playwriting competition, isn’t a great play. It’s not very original either, owing much to Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 drama, A Raisin in the Sun, and to Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’ deliberate and provocative 2010 sequel. It’s a good play, though, with the potential to become an even better play, and it’s a great example of how a regional theater can develop new work that appeals universally while serving a unique audience. Unlike Raisin and Clybourne, which are both set in Chicago neighborhoods, Harold Ellis Clark’s play is set in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. Although it is not specifically about cultural shifts and displacement following Hurricane Katrina, that is the context, and a diverse collection of Southern voices makes We Live Here different enough, more immediate and familiar.

The play begins with a potentially life-threatening situation that’s too current and recognizable. Anybody who follows the news knows it could escalate quickly and go terribly and tragically wrong. We’re introduced to Calvin Chaisson, an angry African-American male who’s duct-taped a white teenager to a chair and who isn’t being 100 percent compliant with the nice police man who’s been dispatched to deal with the situation. Sure, Chaisson is the justifiably rattled homeowner and the target of a racist threat, and he just caught the unapologetic kid vandalizing his house. But in the middle of the night, in the middle of the suburbs, in the heat of the moment, in an America that’s anything but post-racial, minor details like these don’t always seem to matter much, do they? But nobody gets shot here. Instead, a conversation about football breaks out, and the middle-class white kid is escorted home instead of to jail, with the promise of sterner treatment to come.

From the beginning, Clark tinkers with traditional cultural stereotyping, flipping scripts and immersing his viewers in a confusing white privileged world where things clearly aren’t fair because everyone’s good people. But this vision of suburbia isn’t all perfect lawns and white picket fences, either. Methamphetamine has ruined lives. The white family unit has become unstable, and belligerent kids with bad values are raised by well-intentioned grandparents who can’t control them. The newly arrived Chaissons are originally from the meaner (by reputation) streets of New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward and have moved to Metarie after winning their dream house in charity raffle. They’re loving, hard-working, family-oriented folks with hardships in the rearview, promise in the future, and a baby on the way.

We Live Here benefits from John Maness’ no nonsense direction and a strong and committed cast of professionals that includes Jerry Rogers, Michael J. Vails, Karin Barile, Gabriel Corry, Michael Corry, and Claire Kolheim, who’s probably best known for her work in musicals like The Color Purple, but who’s acting chops are every bit as powerful as her voice.

Actor Curtis C., a former Playhouse on the Square company member, returns to Memphis to play an effective but controversial civil rights activist with a taste for good beer.

We Live Here never fully overcomes its own conceits. Situations are contrived, outcomes seem more aspirational than actual, and the dialogue can bog down in portentous information drops. But the play’s architecture is sturdy and hopefully it will have a life beyond TheatreWorks.

Playhouse on the Square produces Mountain View, its second NewWorks play, at TheatreWorks in July.