Much Ado About Hockadoo

Much Ado About Hockadoo

By Tom Wachunas

   …There comes a time when muddy waters run rough /There comes a point when a man has had enough /Like a friend who always stands by me/ Memphis Knows Me /Memphis Shows Me / How this life just has to be… - lyrics from “Memphis Lives in Me”

   After seeing the opening night Players Guild performance of Memphis, I was finally convinced that director and actor/singer Jon Tisevich must have some sort of virus. Furthermore, he consistently passes it on to his superbly versatile cast members who sing, dance, and act with often thunderous ebullience. They’re clearly all too eager, indeed grateful to be infected. It’s a viral tendency you could call the personification of unbridled passion. Combined with the sizzling live eight-piece band under the direction of keyboardist Steve Parsons, and the hot-stepping, hip-swiveling choreography by Michael Lawrence Akers, Memphis is a show that will rattle your rafters and send your heart soaring.  

   This Tony Award- winning musical (book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro, music and lyrics by David Bryan) was partly inspired by Dewey Philips, one of the first white disc jockeys to play black music for white audiences in Tennessee during the 1950s. Here we meet Huey Calhoun, a white, ninth-grade dropout with dreams of being a star radio (and later TV) host who wants to turn the whole world on to black R&B music (or “race music” as it was disparagingly called by whites). His passion for the music is matched only by his love of Felicia, a beautiful black singer he meets at an underground club owned by her brother, Delray. 

    The dramatic tension in this story springs from the romance between Felicia and Huey in a place and time fraught with racial bigotry, and significantly underscored here by Delray’s stern objections to Huey’s pursuit of Felicia. As Delray, Mark Dillard is a towering presence who turns in a genuine and at times chilling portrait of a pragmatic custodian of his sister’s career interests while remaining her militant protector.

   As Felicia, Joy Ellis is absolutely stunning. She deftly balances a complex array of sensibilities. They range from fierce independence and sassiness while basking in the warmth of love, to festering woundedness, and uncertainty about her future with Huey. It all comes out with heartrending sincerity and electrifying urgency when she sings “Make Me Stronger,”  “Colored Woman,” and “Love Will Stand When All Else Falls.” When she was singing, I think I heard not just a voice, but a collective soul. I think I heard history. Passion personified. 

   And then there’s Jon Tisevich as Huey. Director as singer and actor. And again, passion personified.  With a soft southern drawl, he’s quirky, endearingly eccentric, even awkward, and a seemingly unlikely mentor of an aural phenomenon that would change the world of popular music. Whenever he gets excited about an idea he impulsively blurts “hockadoo!” Like Felicia, he’s at once driven and defiant, vulnerable and victorious. His powerful singing of “The Music of My Soul” and “Memphis Lives in Me” are among the most riveting, soul-stirring moments of the evening. 

   A similarly moving and startling passage transpires when Justin Woody, in his role of Gator, who was traumatized into muteness by the childhood memory of his father being lynched, suddenly finds his voice to sing a desperate call for racial peace in “Say a Prayer.” Woody’s tearful voice is an unearthly wail, a piercing, bittersweet plea to Jesus. 

     

   Other memorable scenes include Micah Harvey, wickedly smarmy as the white disc jockey Buck Wiley, and sounding downright lewd as he breathily announces the latest “hot hits” from Patti Page and Roy Rogers. Anthony Mitchell Jr. plays Bobby, a jittery janitor cajoled into singing on Huey’s Memphis TV show. He begins his song, “Big Love,” in a sweetly apologetic and nervous manner, but quickly enough morphs into a gyrating firebrand who brings down the house with charged vocals along with startlingly agile jumps and splits. 

   And speaking of charged, Stephanie Cargill, playing Huey’s mother, sheds her character’s bigotry in a grand way as she belts out “Change Don’t Come Easy” with all the intensity of a preacher at a revival meeting. She exhorts, “Gotta electrify!..We gonna glorify!..Come on, everybody justify!…ooh, I gotta testify!” 

   One distinction between a good theatre experience and a great one is that good theatre will invariably leave audiences pleased that they have been sufficiently “entertained.”  Great theatre certainly achieves as much, but in the end aspires to something far more edifying. 

   As Players Guild productions so often demonstrate in sublime fashion, great theatre is always kind of baptism, and in the case of Memphis, an especially immersive experience wherein we witness the ineffable power of art to inspire hope, harmony, and healing in a dissonant, fractured society. In other words, art that electrifies, glorifies, justifies.

    So hey, I’m infected. I just gotta testify.

   MEMPHIS, at Players Guild Theatre, in the Cultural Center for the Arts, THROUGH SEPTEMBER 3 / 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton, Ohio / Shows Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. / Tickets $29 adults, $26 seniors, $22 for 17 and younger / Order tickets at www.playersguildtheatre.com/memphis  or call  330.453.7617

   PHOTOS from top by Michael Ayers / Joy Ellis, Jon Tisevich, ensemble