A variation on that old saw about jazz pops up early on in A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical — in this case, that it’s not about the notes you play, but “the choices you make in between the notes.” The saying may as well apply to the form of the bio-musical itself. The genre has grown popular on Broadway, given that (as in the movies) you can guarantee a baseline level of audience interest with a familiar name and familiar melodies — and potentially garner some awards with a well-wrought impersonation of the lead character. Watch enough of these shows, though, and all you see is the tropes: a rise and fall, a framing device that allows for awkward first-person narration, a spurned spouse (usually a wife) laying into a classic as a torch song, the most famous tune saved for last to tee up the curtain call. What becomes interesting, then, are the ways a new bio-musical syncopates, in any way, away from the expected. Maybe it leans hard on choreography like MJ or camp like The Cher Show, or puts its lead in therapy as with A Beautiful Noise. In the case of A Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong comes marching into Broadway aboard an overstuffed bio-musical. The decision has been made to play all the expected notes at once, several times over.
Aurin Squire’s book brackets Amstrong’s life into four sections, each set in a different city and built around Louis’s four wives. First, he’s in 1910s New Orleans, finding his way as a musician and falling for the louche Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins, fun as a seductress, but cramped when Louis departs and Daisy turns shrewish). Then we’re off to 1920s Chicago, where Louis meets his mentor, King Joe Oliver, and his second wife, the pianist Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming, finding poise in a part that consists of a lot of stiff lectures) teaches him to value his self-worth and becomes his business manager. After intermission, Louis goes to 1930s Hollywood, struggling with the expectation of playing stereotypes on camera for white audiences and palling around with Alpha Smith (Kim Exum, in delightful airhead mode). Each of these installments tend toward Wikipedia-subhed levels of condensation, but none more so than the final ride, from the 1940s to the 1970s, generally set in New York, in which Armstrong ends up with the Cotton Club dancer Lucille Wilson (Darlesia Cearcy, given the least range to tread as she’s introduced so late), navigates the civil-rights movement, has a run-in with organized crime, and has a big comeback by way of “Hello, Dolly!” You can see why A Wonderful World’s structure might sound compelling in a pitch meeting. It has multiple acts and story arcs, and it nominally shifts some focus to the women in this story about a man. But in practice, that four-part structure makes the action both rush and stall — oh no, you may tense up twice over, another breakup scene? — and constricts those supporting players to brief character sketches.
In the midst of all that, there’s James Monroe Iglehart as Louis himself, leaning hard on the man’s ebullience while shading where he can with bits of self-doubt and repressed anger. Iglehart’s both starring in the role and co-directing — he and Christina Sajous were elevated to receive that credit, alongside director Christopher Renshaw, when the show moved to Broadway — and he attacks the part with the visible enthusiasm of someone getting to lay into a dream gig. His mimicry of Satchmo, the baseline test all these shows must pass, really is quite impressive. He’s found a precise way to conjure that famous grin, a certain swaying wistfulness of posture, and in a few key moments, he noodles on the trumpet. The voice is the crucial thing, and Iglehart gets that too, so much that I struggled to remember what it sounds like to hear Iglehart perform in his actual register. You worry, in fact, about what committing to Louis’s rumble and rasp for eight shows a week might be doing to him. Iglehart got a Tony for his ad-libbing, hyperverbal genie in Aladdin and A Wonderful World also allows him bits of crowd work, where Iglehart excels. He gets the audience, for instance, to sing along to “You Rascal You,” as if they’re members of a police association that Armstrong is sending up with a serenade. That sequence also includes a good barb when Iglehart suggests the “colored workers and servants” in this affluent Broadway audience sing along. Those sequences also tend to be when the show’s tripartite directorial team conjures the most energy. Choreographer Rickey Tripp pulls off some rousing dance sequences, including an intentionally unsettlingly upbeat tap-dance take on “When You’re Smiling.” But in the show’s pile-up of transitions, A Wonderful World tends toward the same blocking and gestures. Those wives, whether alone or in groups, always seem to be sadly gazing at Louis from a distance, like Grizabella waiting for her moment at the Jellicle Ball.
As in that moment, Squire’s and Iglehart’s performance tend to be most compelling when they’re challenging the common image of Armstrong as a naïvely good-humored character who was complaint with the racist expectations of the entertainment industry — in brief glimpses, we see someone more canny and more troubled (as he in fact was in life) than pure eternal optimist. Yet Iglehart’s performance is subject as much as everything else here to those constricting generic expectations of the form. He’s got to give a bio-musical performance, which means broadcasting, in quick succession, a series of emotional peaks and valleys, via what can feel like a grab bag of historical trivia, all encased in restrictive mythos. As he records “Heebie Jeebies,” Iglehart’s Louis drops his sheet music and, while fumbling for words, seems to invent scat-singing on the spot. The too-good-to-be-true version of the incident is based on Louis’s version of events. Though, as Iglehart told the Times, it may be more likely, as his wife of the time Lil claimed, that Louis had the whole bit memorized and knew what he was going to do. “The more fun story is the story Louis tells,” Iglehart admits, and sure — but it’s hard to see how that choice fits in the context of the angle A Wonderful World is nominally working. If we’re hearing from the wives, might the tension between Lil and Louis’s account be compelling?
A lack of clear intention is, itself, perhaps a common bio-musical trope too. Even when shaded with a firmer angle, the overriding message behind most of these productions tends to be, simply, that a great musician was great. Squire, to his credit (it’s easy to blame a book writer for everything in a musical; the flaw here seems deeper), does push toward commentary, but what he comes out with are really four books for four different shows. I’d much rather have this thing cut down to size and watch a show just about Louis’s early days in Chicago and the financial predation of the jazz scene, or one just about him in Hollywood dealing with racist producers. Film biopics often fare better when they narrow their focus: Think of Pablo Larraín carving depths from slivers of a life in Jackie or Spencer. Or, take the model of something like Jelly’s Last Jam and go whole-hog with a concept like putting your lead on trial in the afterlife — that recent Encores! production does, unfortunately for A Wonderful World, hang in comparison to this jazz-icon musical. If we all know the melody these shows always follow, it’s long past time for some variations. But in this case, for an open run on Broadway, we get the whole shebang played as straight as possible. Don’t drop your sheet music. Improvisation is not so welcome here.
A Wonderful World is at Studio 54.
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