Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit
By Kelly Kleiman
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These two plays address the toll taken on the people whose lives highlighted civil rights injustices, people in conflict not only with a society that wouldn’t give them their due but with their own dreams of living free of their group identity. It wasn’t enough that Nathaniel Cole was a wonderful pianist and singer–he had to fit into the role assigned African-American musicians in midcentury America, assuming a comic title (“Nat King Cole,” like Old King Cole) and an unfaltering smile. And he had to consciously decide whether to entertain white audiences while audiences of his color waited outside. White artists could choose to pay attention to that issue or not. Cole had no choice in the matter.
The two plays have virtually identical scenes in which the artists face a press hotly demanding to know why they perform for segregated audiences. In this awkward situation, both Cole and Anderson reply as artists: Cole says that the black audience was just as well entertained as the white, and Anderson that she should be spared questions “exclusively within the Negro-ness of my life.” Both replies seem sadly lacking–they’re the words of people who didn’t measure up to what the times demanded and who betrayed others’ battles for justice. But it seems they were forced to choose one betrayal or another–of art or of justice. It was not the individual artist but the culture that failed to measure up.
The orchestra for The Nat King Cole Story (Unforgettable), by contrast, is so big and loud–especially the horns–that it overwhelms the voices, the strongest element of this weak show. Though the astonishing Mark Townsend provides a perfect imitation of Cole’s singing and adds his own considerable warmth, charm, and musical skill, he’s stuck in the middle of a play that has yet to be written.
