An Improbable Broadway Debut As casting against type, k.d. langs current stand, through March 9th, as a featured torch singer in the jazz-and-dance revue, After Midnight, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre takes some beating. The show, which opened last fall with American Idol winner Fantasia in that role, is a 90-minute no-dead-air evocation of the music and body swing that filled the bill at New Yorks Cotton Club in the Twenties and Thirties. The house band, comprised of members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, blitzes through the score – more than two dozen nuggets from the Harlem Renaissance hit parade, all but a handful associated with the Cotton Clubs breakout star Duke Ellington – with crisp exhiliration. There is no slack in the rest of the company. In their cut-and-slither duel Hottentot Tot, Julius iGlide Chisolm and Virgil LilO Gadson pay comic homage to the rubbery dynamics and proto-hip-hop invention of African-American dance teams such as the Nicholas Brothers. You may know Sippie Wallaces cautionary blues Women Be Wise from Bonnie Raiits 1971 recording, but Adriane Lenox takes it way back and down home, in jittery-spitfire italics, with JALC brawn. Lang has to follow that showstopper (after an instrumental breather). But her entrance, with the Jazz Age valentine I Cant Give You Anything But Love, is also full-bodied romantic protest, lined with more elegant shiver. Lang is making her Broadway debut in After Midnight. But she has been ready for the standards in this gig, like Stormy Weather, since her 1988 prairie-ballroom-covers breakthrough, Shadowland. And Lang gets laughs too. Her growling simulation of Cab Calloway in Zah Zuh Zaz isnt just funny – its believable. (My measure for that: I actually met the great hipster.) The original razzle and dazzle recreated in After Midnight was, in fact, a Broadway phenomenon. First opened uptown on Lenox Avenue, the Cotton Club was located, in its heyday, at Broadway and 48th Street, a block and a half from the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It was also a segregated venue; The entertainment was black; the customers rich, white and curious about a culture they deemed immoral and inferior in daylight. In that sense, Lang – gay, white and an emigrant (from Canada) – is a natural for this show, singing from the outside looking in; a voice of exclusion, seeking comfort and acceptance and steeped in blues. Read more: rollingstone/music/blogs/alternate-take/angelique-kidjos-african-dance-k-d-langs-harlem-nocturne-20140220#ixzz2vYeGt4mv Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:34:10 +0000
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