ajhlovestheatre

WHITE GIRL IN DANGER

Book, Music and Lyrics by Michael R Jackson

Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Tony Kiser Theater at Second Stage, New York City – until 21 May 2023

https://2st.com/shows/white-girl-in-danger

It’s hard to believe that this bizarre confection is from the same pen and mind of the artist who gave us the Pulitzer and Tony-winning A Strange Loop, one of the most exciting, ambitious and iconoclastic musicals in decades. Following a preview period and, one would imagine, earlier workshops and readings, Michael R Jackson’s new musical hits the stage, in a desperately unfocused nproduction by Lileana Blain-Cruz, looking more like a first draft than a fully realised piece.

Where Jackson’s masterly earlier piece had a wild but razor sharp vision and a refreshing, fearless honesty, White Girl In Danger gets bogged down in a mire of confusion, unsubtle tropes and unfunny camp as it attempts to examine Black characters fitting into predominantly white narratives in popular entertainment (specifically trashy day time soaps), and the concept of Black womanhood as a whole. At least I think that’s what it’s about, because it’s far from easy to follow, an issue exacerbated by an execrable sound design that renders approximately seventy five per cent of the words completely unintelligible.

It doesn’t seem like Jackson is all that clear what he’s on about either, hence a scene near the end where he appears as a God-like character with an extended monologue (performed brilliantly, to be fair, by Strange Loop alumnus James Jackson Jr) that attempts to unpick and explicate what we’ve all been watching for the best part of three hours. It’s too little and too late, sloppy storytelling that suggests a playwright not at all in charge of his creation.

Musically, there is some exciting stuff here. Jackson builds on his talent for sophisticated pastiche, demonstrated so brilliantly in A Strange Loop, and here gives us a selection of persuasive earworm bangers covering everything from soul to disco and gospel. I’ve no idea what most of the lyrics were but there are some great tunes.

Given that White Girl In Danger predominantly lampoons bad TV dramas, one might expect it to reference a lot of television (there’s a random nod to Sex And The City at one point) but, presumably because it’s a musical, it tends to riff more on other tuners, including Little Shop of Horrors, Into The Woods and Caroline (Or Change), which makes little sense, and has the unfortunate further side effect of forcibly reminding one how much better all those shows actually are. Blain-Cruz’s staging, all cartoon-like zaniness but little coherence, makes the fatal mistake of sending up “bad” acting and performance styles badly. What should be sharp and hilarious feels self-indulgent and amateurish. The “soap opera” plot has elements of Heathers and Mean Girls, and this show, with its cacophonous excess and charmless meandering, makes their respective musical adaptations feel like Sondheim.

The cast work their socks off but are required for the most part to perform at such a full throttle energy level that any nuance goes straight out of the window. Raja Feather-Kelly’s manic choreography is performed with admirable commitment but, at least at the performance I saw, appallingly sloppy pacing and placing. The central role of Keesha Gibbs, suddenly promoted to a best friend role in an otherwise all-white TV soap (Jackson makes a number of eye-rollingly obvious plays on the word “white” throughout), is played with real skill by LaToya Edwards, who is clearly very talented. She has terrific stage presence and a powerful voice, but is saddled with a role with such whiplash fast changes in attitude and intent that it’s almost unplayable.

As Nell, her Everywoman mama who rapidly and inexplicably rises through every strata of society and profession in the course of the show, and gets a deafening 11 o’clock long on riffing but short on everything else, Tarra Conner Jones is shrill, committed and about as subtle as a steamroller in a frock. Molly Hager, Alyse Alan Louis and Lauren Marcus play with gusto a trio of mean girl type Caucasian protagonists from the soap all of whose character titles are variations on the same name (and of course White is in the surname), and clearly all have considerable performing chops, despite the exaggerated obviousness of what they’ve been tasked with, and the crass “jokes” about topics like self-harm and eating disorders.

It’s just all so lacking in real wit and originality. There’s an over-abundance of ideas and concepts that never get followed through and the sheer length of the show coupled with a cast of characters from which we are (presumably deliberately) kept at arms length, means that boredom eventually sets in. There are moments where it seems to be aiming at being edgy and shocking but the really shocking thing here is that this script ever got beyond the first table read or that anybody looked at Adam Rigg’s threadbare set design or Montana Levi Blanco’s hideous costumes and thought they were ok. Visually, this is an ugly and cheap looking production that feels less redolent of the daytime TV drama it’s sending up than the least imaginative, underfunded am-dram.

White Girl In Danger is, at least at this stage of its development, a confused and confusing hot mess. I can only hope it’s a blip and that the sizzling A Strange Loop (coming to the Barbican this summer and on no account to be missed by anybody with a genuine interest in musical theatre) represents the authentic artistry of Michael R Jackson, rather than the other way round. London critics gave the satirical Berlusconi musical at Southwark a really rough ride recently….well, that show, over-ambitious as it is, wipes the floor with this.