RAISIN • The Black Rep

In a cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side, the Youngers are about to receive a windfall from an insurance payout, and a couple members of the family have different ideas about how best to spend it. Based on Lorraine Hansberry’s remarkable landmark drama, A Raisin in the Sun, this Tony award-winning musical adaptation preserves all of the emotional beats of the play, with songs that add breadth to the lives of its characters, while only occasionally interrupting the momentum of the plot. But this is a quibble with the musical, and not the production. Under the direction of The Black Rep’s founder, Ron Himes, Raisin soars and dips through the aspirations and hardships of a working-class family living in the 1950s, when a piece of the American Dream glinted just inside the fringes of what seemed possible.

STICK FLY • The Black Rep

The Black Rep continues its 38th season with Lydia Diamond's "Stick Fly", a family drama with a bit of a twist. The two Levay sons, Kent and Flip, are bringing their significant others over for a weekend at their summer home on Martha's Vineyard. Like most residents on Martha's Vineyard, the Levays are wealthy, but unlike most residents, they're also black.

The patriarch of the family is Joe (Erik Kilpatrick), a neurosurgeon, who would have enough money on his own, but has married into more money through his wife's family, who's owned a shipping business that reaches back to slavery times. He shows up later, but first to arrive is Kent, (Chauncy Thomas) the youngest, with his fiancée, Taylor (Sharisa Whatley). He's a writer who is on the verge, after many career stops and starts, of becoming a full-fledged novelist, and Taylor is an entomologist. Her father was a distinguished academic, so Taylor grew up with prestige, but she didn't grow up with money -- estranged from her father, and overwhelmed by prospect of marrying into this affluent family. Flip (Reginald Pierre) is a plastic surgeon, who is bringing his girlfriend Kimber (Meghan Maguire), also highly educated, and white. Added to the mix is 18 year old Cheryl (Rhyan Robinson), university-bound, who is currently filling in for the duties of her mother, the Levay's ailing maid. The mother of the family, Michelle Levay, is mysteriously absent, and despite needling from the sons, Joe remains silent about her whereabouts. The advantages of money and education can't be enough to propel you past some things -- particularly race, and Diamond's script offers a heaping helping of soapy dynamics, family secrets and bombshells.

PURLIE • The Black Rep

Ossie Davis’s Tony Award winning musical debuted in 1970, and is based on the play, “Purlie Victorious", that he wrote in 1961. The Black Rep gives this uplifting show about freedom and tenacity a rousing production.

We start at the funeral of Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Jim Anthony), the late, cocky, bull-whip wielding owner of a cotton plantation in rural Georgia. Purlie Victorious (Kelvin Roston, Jr.) is conducting the service, and though everyone's convinced the Cap'n is probably frying in hell right about now, Purlie and the congregation that toiled under his service, are giving him a fine send-off in the gospel-flavored opening number, "Walk Him Up the Stairs". From here, we're taken back to Purlie's quest to buy back the local church his father started, Big Bethel, from the hands of Cotchipee. There's a $500 inheritance that's due to Purlie's deceased Cousin Bea, so he plans to fool Ol' Cap'n into handing over the money to an impersonator, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Alicia Revé). Lutiebelle is straight out of Alabama and as country as a chicken coop, but willing to do anything to help out Purlie, whom she becomes very fond of. Purlie also enlists the help of his brother Gitlow (J. Samuel Davis) and Gitlow's wife Missy (Kimmie Kidd) to pull off the scheme, with Cotchipee's own son Charlie (Greg Matzker) playing his part in the plot.

THE WIZ • The Black Rep

The Black Rep concludes its 36th season with The Wiz (full title -- The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical "Wonderful Wizard of Oz"), adapted from L. Frank Baum's classic children’s novel and patterned after the indelible 1939 film.  The Wiz made a lasting impression when it premiered in 1975.  Featuring a score of 1970's R&B, rock and gospel, it was the first Broadway musical to feature an all-black cast, and dazzled mainstream audiences racking up seven Tony Awards, including Best Original Score, Best Direction and Best Musical.  It also inspired the commercially unsuccessful and altogether bizarre 1978 film, featuring Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Diana Ross as Dorothy, among many others.

The familiar songs from "The Wizard of Oz" like, "We're Off to See the Wizard" and "If I Only Had a Heart", are molded into an urban frame of reference and replaced with "Ease On Down the Road", and "Slide Some Oil to Me".  The basics are the same -- after a tornado drops Dorothy (Sarah Stephens), into a strange land, she teams up with the Scarecrow (Ian Coulter-Buford), the Tin Man (Keith Tyrone), and the Lion (Herman Gordon), all headed for the Emerald City in search of The Wiz (Cedric Neal) for brains, a heart, courage, and a way back home.  There are also good and bad witches, monkeys, a pair of glittery shoes, some poignant life lessons, along with some plot detours from the film.  These detours yield some great songs and new scenes, but also some disconnects.  I suppose I'm used to the Wicked Witch of the West making her appearance earlier on, but in The Wiz, we're given a tasty little morsel of her wickedness, and then poof!  She's gone soon after with very little development leading up to it.  And why does the Wiz show himself so early?  Kind of takes the punch out of the reveal that he's just an ordinary guy, however stylish.

SMASH/HIT! • The Black Rep

Receiving its world premiere at the Black Rep, Smash/Hit!, written by Steve Broadnax and Michael S. Bordner, centers around "Money" (Ronald L. Conner), and his aspirations of making it big on the hip-hop scene along with his childhood friend, Chance (Matthew Galbreath).  The play also touches on other subjects -- the plight of poverty, post-traumatic stress disorder, father/son dynamics and homophobia in the black community.  It tries to cover a lot of ground.  Maybe too much.

THE WHIPPING MAN • The Black Rep

Matthew Lopez's intriguing play about a Jewish family of sorts premiered in 2011 off-Broadway and garnered Lucille Lortel, Obie and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and it's getting a powerful production in its St. Louis premiere at the Black Rep.

INSIDIOUS • The Black Rep

Ibn Shabazz's Insidious had its 2010 premiere at Road Less Traveled Productions in Buffalo, New York, and the Black Rep's production of this St. Louis premiere, the play's second mounting, is fearless.  Insidious takes an unblinking look at addiction, promiscuity and men on the "down low" -- men who engage in unprotected sex with other men, while maintaining relationships with girlfriends and wives.  Because of its adult language and themes, I would leave the kids at home for this one.

NO CHILD • The Black Rep

There's a lot packed into Nilaja Sun's play that garnered Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Theatre World and Obie Awards when it opened off-Broadway in 2006.

The title of the play is a reference to the No Child Left Behind Act that ended up putting school test scores ahead of curriculums that often included the arts.  Sun draws on her own experience as a teaching artist in the New York City school system and delivers a play about the failures, struggles, successes and expectations of the students within the fictional Malcolm X High School in the Bronx.  These kids have been, for the most part, written off, and this lively one-act shares the perspective of a teacher taking on one of the "worst classes in school" in an attempt to get these 10th graders to learn, rehearse, and perform a play -- Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

PERICLES • The Black Rep

The Black Rep opens its 34th season with PERICLES, a Shakespeare play that's seldom performed.  It draws from a couple of sources, and is generally thought of to have been only half written by Shakespeare.

It seems tempting for many directors to play around with times and locations for Shakespeare's plays.  Andrea Frye's direction moves the locales from places like Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mytilene, to Pre-Colonial Africa, 20th century Haiti, 1950's Havana, the Gullah Islands in the 1960's and 1920's New Orleans.