Culture Sauce - MIXED / NEGATIVE
Todrick Hall does it all in the beautiful, bloated musical ‘Midnight’ and that’s the problem (Off Broadway review)
https://culturesauce.com/todrick-hall-midnight-muscial-off-broadway-review/
There is a great musical in — possibly two or three — but it gets lost in the beautiful but bloated production that opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Daryl Roth Theatre.
Hall has crafted a memorably catchy and eclectic score that draws on both musical theater tropes (with some operatic flourishes) as well as pop, R&B and gospel.... There are also a fair number of place-holding clunkers, and would-be showstoppers lined up back-to-back like pageant queens trying to outdo the competitor who came just before.
In an ideal world, a strong, experienced director or producer would sit down with the book writer, composer, and lyricist to help hone the material: to trim the fat, tighten the storytelling, and to pinpoint moments that don’t quite land (sometimes because they are blatantly anachronistic for a period piece like this). In this case, Hall holds all of these roles — in addition to choreographer and star — which perhaps explains why a show that is so packed with promise also comes off so messily.Hall’s premise is a provocative one, to retell Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play as a musical — while also injecting elements of everything from Hamilton to Cinderella, as well as The Color Purple, Suffs, and Brokeback Mountain.
Yes, there is a jarring power imbalance here that Hall mostly chooses to ignore. His attempts to treat this dalliance as a great queer love story that’s tragically ahead of its time is undercut by both Rail’s initial reluctance as well as the glaring lack of chemistry between the two actors. He also seems more interested in the idea of the relationship than in fleshing out characters who seem destined to be together; after one impulsive kiss, they spend most of their time writing mash notes to each other.
All too often, Hall’s admirable ambition works to the show’s detriment. He has too many ideas, too many songs to cram into one slender show, and imposes too much structure to tell a simple story well. After a lengthy first act introducing a whopping 12 characters, he pulls a switcheroo where the white actors and Black actors swap places in parallel roles. Hall dons a frilly coat as Richard, and Beloate puts on work clothes as Rail; the rest of the cast follow suit. The idea is hastily and sloppily introduced in a rushed Act 1 closer about getting the whites to walk a mile in the shoes of their enslaved workers — and we learn only later that this is a one-day-only swap due to expire, Cinderella-like, at midnight on the day of Richard’s wedding to Southern belle Scarlet.
The idea does allow Hall to depict some of the show’s most horrific brutality as it’s inflicted by Black actors on white bodies, which complicates the audience’s response if not entirely mitigating its horror. The move also enables the Black principals to shine while singing in more traditional musical theater or even operatic styles; the white actors’ attempts at more soulful, R&B, or gospel modes are, unsurprisingly, less convincing. But the swap doesn’t deepen our understanding of Richard and Rail’s fledgling romance — and a mid-act revelation further complicates matters. Moreover, does anyone in 21st-century America need to see indentured whites to “get” the injustice of slavery? The gambit removes us further from identifying with the star-crossed love story that’s supposedly at the heart of the show.
Even great creators need strong collaborators, sounding boards who will nudge them to revise, streamline, and “murder their darlings” in the service of producing a better final product. Midnight has flashes of luminous greatness, but too often Hall does not know when to stop. There’s a meandering final song, full of muddled references to the number 12 and spoken-word updates on the progress made toward equality for Blacks and queer people in the U.S. since the 1860s, that feels utterly superfluous. Especially when compared to encore song that Hall leads post-curtain call, a choral masterpiece that perfectly sums up the “new day” that the show envisions and sends the audience out on a goosebumpy high. ★★★☆☆
CITITOUR - MIXED / NEGATIVE
Brian Lipton
https://cititour.com/NYC_News/Midnight-Strikes-a-Chord/11120
Just because one person directs and choreographs a show, writes its book, lyrics and music, and plays the lead role, does that make the piece a “vanity project?” In the case of the multi-talented Todrick Hall, who performs all these duties in the audacious, ambitious musical “Midnight,” now clocking in at nearly three hours at the Daryl Roth Theatre, the answer is hardly black and white.
Here’s why: Hall creates a lot of memorable visual pictures, especially in the dance sequences, and crafts a tuneful, occasionally thrilling sung-through gospel-R&B score (admittedly one that is initially a bit heavy on narration) that nonetheless owes significant debts to both “Hamilton” and “Les Miserables.” Above all, Hall pens a story about the horrors of slavery and the consequences of both racial and homophobic hatred in Civil War America that feels scarily resonant two centuries later.
But there’s no denying someone else should have looked at all these elements, which might have made “Midnight” a more satisfying (and shorter) event. That’s especially true of the “twist” in the overlong, underpowered second act in which the black actors now play the white parts (and vice versa) in a world that’s magically been turned upside-down.
It’s a device that might have been interesting for five minutes (like a “dream ballet”), but not for 75 minutes, where it quickly becomes both tedious and confusing -- not to mention a bit heavy-handed while trying to prove Hall’s pivotal point that one can’t understand another person (both literally and figuratively) until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.
Any “vanity” aside, it’s never in doubt that Hall sincerely wants “Midnight” to be a wake-up call that we should all learn to treat each other better. I’m just not sure he had to clock us over the head with that message.
