There’s a song that fills the air, when the Five Points comes alive…
The new musical Paradise Square begins previews tomorrow night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, prior to an April 3 official opening. The show features music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Masi Asare and Nathan Tysen, book by Christina Anderson, Marcus Gardley, Craig Lucas, and Larry Kirwan, choreography by Bill T. Jones, and direction by Moisés Kaufman. Paradise Square boasts an impressive company of 40, led by principal cast members Joaquina Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, John Dossett, Sidney DuPont, A.J. Shively, Matt Bogart, Nathaniel Stampley, Gabrielle McClinton, Kevin Dennis, and Jacob Fishel.
“New York, 1863. As the Civil War rages on, free Black Americans and Irish immigrants live and love together in the unlikeliest of neighborhoods – the dangerous streets and crumbling tenement houses of Lower Manhattan’s notorious Five Points slum. The amalgamation between the communities took its most exuberant form with raucous dance contests on the floors of the neighborhood bars and dance halls. It is here in the Five Points where tap dancing was born. But this racial equilibrium would come to a sharp end when President Lincoln’s need to institute the first Federal Draft to support the Union Army would incite the deadly NY Draft Riots of July 1863.
Within this galvanizing story of racial harmony undone by a country at war with itself, we meet the denizens of a local saloon called Paradise Square. These characters include the indomitable Black woman who owns it; her Irish-Catholic sister-in-law and her Black minister husband; a conflicted newly arrived Irish immigrant; a fearless freedom seeker; an anti-abolitionist political boss; and a penniless songwriter trying to capture it all. They have conflicting notions of what it means to be an American while living through one of the most tumultuous eras in our country’s history.”
Since the conversation has already started… who else is going?
“I am furious, but I am sailing.”
