Theatre in Review: A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical (Studio 54)

	James Monroe Iglehart. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

A Wonderful World opens with jazz great Louis Armstrong caught in a shaft of stark white light, his horn raised and ready to rip. It's a striking image, a carefully arranged bit of pop idolatry, and it tips us off that the production will be unusually gorgeously designed. You should savor it because, two acts later, you won't know much more about Louis Armstrong.

A foundational figure in jazz; master scat singer; sometime movie star; and, in his later years, a face known to every man, woman, and child in America, Armstrong was a giant, his career spanning the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, his music enduring through two world wars, the Great Depression, the upheavals of the Civil Rights era, and the rise of rock and roll. (As he notes here, with no small satisfaction, his recording of "Hello, Dolly!" knocked The Beatles off the top of the pop charts. His life is quite a story, or it should be.

Like Jersey Boys, still the gold standard for Broadway musical bios, A Wonderful World is divided into quarters, focusing on Armstrong's four marriages. But while Jersey Boys offers a fresh perspective as each new character steps forward to act as narrator, here, the musician's wives come and go so quickly that we barely get to know them. They're a varied bunch, and that's putting it mildly, each representing a distinctive temperament and identified with a different city. Dionne Figgins, wielding a switchblade, is spouse number one Daisy Parker, a prostitute unwilling to leave New Orleans. She is succeeded by Jennie Harney-Fleming as Lil Hardin, an important jazz musician and arranger who puts Armstrong on the path to success. For sheer contrast, you can't do better than Kim Exum, all wrapped up in fur as Alpha Smith, a Lorelei Lee-style baby doll who is in it for the shopping. Commanding the most stage time is Darlesia Cearcy as Lucille Wilson, the wife who lasts, providing the peripatetic Armstrong with his first real home while forcing him to surrender his too-easy ways with the ladies.

You could probably get a full musical out of any of these episodes. But, just as one of these fine actresses starts to make an impression, there's another wife on deck, ready to take her place. Armstrong wanders through, changing very little as he flees New Orleans for Chicago and the patronage of the bandleader King Joe Oliver, strikes out on his own, endures a few frustrating years in Hollywood, and ultimately undergoes a perpetual tour under the guidance of his manager Joe Glaser. James Monroe Iglehart's Armstrong is a superb impersonation, down to that voice like a gravel road and the toothy, Panavision smile that, perhaps, hides a tad of anxiety but, moving from one tumultuous era after another, his persona, arrived at early on, remains forever fixed.

The supporting characters don't have much more to them. Gavin Gregory's King Joe Oliver is a huckster out of a movie melodrama, predictably ending up on the skids as a reward for his manipulating ways. The gifted tap dancer Dewitt Fleming, Jr., shows up as Lincoln Perry (aka, the shuffling, eye-bulging character actor Stepin Fetchit) to offer a quick lesson in Hollywood stereotyping during a rousingly staged "When You're Smiling." Jimmy Smagula's Joe Glaser is a one-note showbiz macher. As Terry Teachout's incisive solo play Satchmo at the Waldorf notes, Armstrong and Glaser had a complicated, interdependent relationship, culminating in a terrible betrayal revealed only after Glaser's death. But you won't learn anything about that in A Wonderful World. The musical's darkest moments, all of them linked to race -- the killing of a fellow musician; the menacing presence of the mob; the hundred-and-one microaggressions endured on film sets; and the lone moment when Armstrong speaks out, denouncing the Little Rock, Arkansas school crisis -- are given perfunctory treatment.

Like the other entries in the bio-musical genre, A Wonderful World is shaped by musical selections that do little to undergird the story. In this case, the songs have at least a nodding acquaintance with their situations. When Armstrong, freezing in Chicago, feels homesick, he naturally launches into "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" At a low point, you just know he'll deliver the Fats Waller hit "Black and Blue." Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek" makes a charming courting number for Armstrong and Lucille. The minor jazz classic "Big Butter and Egg Man" tells you plenty about Alpha's motivations. And a medley of "Some of These Days" and "After You've Gone" makes a solid duet for Lily and Daisy, when both are done with Armstrong. Still, most of these numbers come, jarringly, with associations from many other contexts and the lyrics don't do the hard work of filling out the characters with fresh nuances.

Even more oddly, a musical about jazz has very little...jazz. Branford Marsalis' orchestrations and arrangements have plenty of zip but only rarely -- most notably in a tasty rendition of "Avalon," performed during Armstrong's stint on a riverboat -- do the production's musicians get to cut loose. Similarly, Rickey Tripp's choreography is loaded with lively ideas -- especially in a raucous promenade staged to a medley of "Basin Street Blues" and "Bourbon Street Parade" -- but when a number threatens to turn into a showstopper, it gets cut off to make room for another fast-breaking plot development.

The production's most unabashedly successful aspects are its design elements. Scenic/video designers Adam Koch and Steven Royal, making their Broadway debuts, set the action in a cavernous, faintly haunted-looking theatre that instantly transforms into a moss-drenched, louver-shuttered New Orleans; a sleek Chicago nightclub lined with luminous liquor bottles; a Hollywood soundstage; and the living room of Armstrong's home in Corona, Queens. This basic approach is filled out with projected images of riverboats, snowy streets, film credit sequences, and archival footage of Black children facing racist crowds in Little Rock. Cory Pattak's bold, highly directional, deeply saturated lighting gives each sequence an extra theatrical boost. Toni-Leslie James' costumes confidently stride through the decades; as one would expect of a designer whose Broadway career began with the musical Jelly's Last Jam, she makes clothes that move effortlessly with dancers. Sound designer Kai Harada maintains the highest level of intelligibility while providing the orchestra plenty of room to shine.

It's possible that A Wonderful World is a case of too many cooks: The book is by Aurin Squire, with additional credits for conceivers Andrew Delaplaine and Christopher Renshaw. The latter is also the director, with Iglehart and Christina Sajous listed as co-directors. That's a mighty expansive team for a show that tries to pack an entire life into a crowded two-and-a-half hours. But when you try to tell everything, nothing means much of anything; characters and incidents come and go in rapid succession, rarely making an impact. There must have been plenty going on behind that trademark Louis Armstrong grin, but you'll have to look elsewhere to find out about it. --David Barbour