A recent business trip landed me in New York City for a weekend where I filled my days and nights studying marketing and business strategies.
Just kidding. It was just a shallow excuse for me to go to a lot of Broadway shows. The first show I saw was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a play with a little music about the effects of racism on its victims. Ma Rainey, one of the first popular music divas -- performed gorgeously by Whoopi Goldberg -- has just put her tour on hold to record a couple of songs and is a bit late.
In the meantime, the punctual band relaxes and avoids practicing, but their banter and exchanges become a window into their collective psyches. The musician who rises to the theatrical limelight is Levee played by Charles S. Dutton, the lead trumpet player whose comical antics degenerate into a chilling darkness evidenced through power struggles and physical violence.
The continuing analysis of his character drive this play forward as we watch the insecure Levee attempt to establish dominance over the band leader and Ma Rainey, both black. He concedes to the power of the white antagonistic forces in the play performed by the manager and the record executive, all while trying to heal his tortured past.
As dark as the play becomes the story almost never loses its sense of humor and fun with the occasional song sung by the bass playing Slow Drag played by Steven McKinley Henderson and Goldberg. More comic relief is added with the introduction of Rainey's stuttering nephew Sylvester, played cooly by Anthony Mackie.
In the end, after the chills going down my spine subsided, I found I had not only been successfully entertained for over two hours, but I had also witnessed an important work of art. The next show I attended was Disney's "Aida," an adaptation of the Verdi opera set to the music of Elton John. After the complex beauty of "Ma Rainey" I left "Aida" more than a little offended.
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The dancing was good and the sets were fantastic but the music, lyrics and storyline combined into one of the most profound mixtures of artistic diarrhea I have ever witnessed.
It was as if instead of composing a long-range musical narrative, John took a dozen songs he hadn't released and smashed them together.
This coupled with the imperialist storyline -- basically a "thumbs-up" for patriarchal misogynist European colonialism -- combined into quite an atrocity.
The tragic ending, of course, is altered to suit Disney's message which likes to tell our young girls that you may only define yourself through your men and that the murdered victims of colonization get to have a happy life when they are reincarnated in the present as citizens of post-industrial powers.
