Aida
Northlight Theatre
Given these conditions, what makes a musical work is consistency of vision and purpose–which Dinah Was has and Aida doesn’t. Every aspect of Dinah Was clicks with every other aspect, giving it coherence and momentum. The live-wire performance of leading lady E. Faye Butler is bolstered by the intelligently integrated efforts of director David Petrarca, playwright Oliver Goldstick, musical supervisor Jason Robert Brown (who arranged the show’s score of classic jazz and pop tunes), choreographer George Faison, and designers Michael Yeargan (sets), Paul Tazewell (costumes), Robert Perry (lights), and Rob Milburn (sound). In contrast, Aida is a patchwork quilt whose all-too-evident loose ends constantly threaten to unravel. Tried out last year in Atlanta under the title Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, and much revised since that technically troubled production’s poor reception, it’s as much a showpiece for a compelling black singer-actress as Dinah Was. But no star could salvage the ineptly coordinated contributions of director Robert Falls, songwriters Elton John and Tim Rice, choreographer Wayne Cilento, book writers Linda Woolverton, David Henry Hwang, and Falls, designers Bob Crowley (sets and costumes), Natasha Katz (lights), and Steve C. Kennedy (sound).
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But why go to Aida when you can see the terrific, less expensive Dinah Was? LA-based playwright Goldstick’s portrait of Chicago-bred blues diva Dinah Washington features sharp one-liners and snappy exchanges that keep the show crackling even when it’s probing the troubled side of Washington’s personality. This is no sentimental whitewash of the singer, whose rapid rise from teenage talent-contest winner to the top of the R & B and pop charts was cut short in 1963 when she died at age 39 from too much pills and liquor. Dinah Was depicts a woman who, as she says here, could be “very generous” or “one coldhearted evil bitch,” driving her friends away even as she drove herself on.
Interestingly, Dinah Was and Aida are both the work of directors affiliated with the Goodman Theatre: Petrarca is a resident director, while Falls is of course the artistic director. Both shows reflect the emergence of the young turks of off-Loop theater in the 1970s and ’80s onto the national Broadway and regional-theater scene–and Aida has other significant Chicago connections as well. The Disney executive team responsible for it includes Peter Schneider of the old Saint Nicholas Theatre Company and Stuart Oken, cofounder of the Apollo Theater Center, while the president of the expensively refurbished Cadillac Palace is Michael Leavitt, who not so long ago was scrambling around town directing for troupes like Pegasus Players and the now-defunct Absolute Theatre Company. Longtime observers of off-Loop theater can take pride in these fellows’ success while holding them to the standard of the high-quality (but low-cost) work that established their reputations. By that or any standard, Dinah Was is a triumph that affirms the strength of regional nonprofit theater, while Aida sounds either a wake-up call or the death knell for the overpriced extravaganzas that have come to dominate Broadway in the last 20 years.
