Jelly's Last Jam takes the measure of a man -- in legacy, words, deeds, and musical notes -- resulting in a portrait that's not always kind. Jazz innovator Jelly Roll Morton, according to George C. Wolfe's Tony Award-nominated script, was as tempestuous as he was talented.
The 1992 Broadway musical, receiving its first major Equity production in more than a decade, also picks at issues of race, sex, success, and failure -- an ambitious agenda in an ambitious show, one of the few book musicals written for an African-American cast. This new and reduced staging at the Alliance Theatre, directed and co-choreographed by the company's associate artistic director, Kent Gash, often soars, even though Act II is so brief it feels stunted.
Born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in 1890 in New Orleans, Morton boastfully proclaimed himself the creator of jazz, something Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden might argue with. But facts didn't matter much to Morton. Music, women, booze, jewels, and other cushy accoutrements did. Plus, he was outrageously gifted, and clearly a con man. He used people -- his best friend, his best girl -- when he thought they could advance his chief cause: himself.
Playing this likable, silk-smooth manipulator is tricky. Gregory Hines did it and earned a Tony Award; New York actor J.D. Goldblatt wears the tap shoes this time, syncopated footwork often standing in for Morton's prowess at the keyboard, and he is everything the complicated, conflicted man should be: charming and cutthroat, vulnerable and bullying. His confident dancing and vocals seem effortless. He is simply buoyant.
The talented, tireless, and versatile ensemble of 16 (the Broadway company numbered 24) comes largely from New York, with a few regional artists and Georgians in the mix. Four are non-Equity, and many are doubling or tripling in smaller roles. Eric B. Anthony is too dark-skinned as Young Jelly (Morton's light skin and Creole heritage helped yield many of his opportunities and plenty of his problems), but he dances like a dream, at one point going from the extreme tips of his taps to splits as he morphs from insecure youth to swaggering man about N'awlins.
Broadway regular Billy Porter (Grease, Miss Saigon, Five Guys Named Moe) gives a strangely restrained, androgynous performance as the Chimney Man, Morton's spiritual tour guide. One imagines more flash, more charisma in such a key role. Darryl G. Ivey, who conducts, plays, and arranged the reduced score, leads a seven-member band that blows prodigiously from upstage.
Jelly's Last Jam takes place in the Jungle Inn, a lowdown club "somewhere's between heaven and hell," on the day of Morton's death. Chimney Man nudges him from a slab at the morgue and whispers, "And in one breath, a man becomes a memory." Moments like these glint with shards of Dickens and Cervantes, making this piece of musical theatre zing like poetry. Indeed, Chimney Man becomes like a griot version of the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future as he forces Morton to face his history. Later, when things aren't going well, Chimney Man makes Morton see his true self in a bank of mirrors. It's times like these the musical becomes high art.
It can also become disturbing. Morton often refers to his buddy, Jack the Bear (Rodrick Covington), with the N-word; the "Doctor Jazz" number puts the company in oversized minstrel masks with exaggerated white lips and white-lined eyes. Gash has said that by pulling audiences in with entertainment, you can also make them think. He's right. We also squirm.
Like the man it portrays, Jelly's Last Jam is imperfect but dazzling. That it can also prick the conscience is a very good thing.
Jelly's Last Jam runs March 15-April 9 at the Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. Tickets: (404) 733-5000. Website: www.alliancetheatre.org.