When Nat King Cole performed “The Party’s Over” on his NBC variety show, he did it with a smile, as he seemed to do everything. But the song bitterly resonated on that particular broadcast, Cole’s final outing as a host, having quit after just over a year’s worth of struggles finding national advertisers. “It’s time to wind up / The masquerade,” he sang. “Just make your mind up / The piper must be paid.”
Written by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, the formally ambitious, if muddled, “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole” takes place on that fateful Dec. 17, 1957, when the pianist and singer said goodbye to his audience. (Note that Domingo, who is famous as an actor these days, does not appear in the show.)
The framing device is not unlike that of “Goodnight, and Good Luck,” which is also set in a TV studio, and both shows look at a momentous taping as a mode of resistance against America’s powers-that-be. But “Lights Out” takes a very different tack from the George Clooney and Grant Heslov play’s straightforward embrace of docu-like similitude .
“Some of you thought you were going to get a nice and easy holiday show,” Sammy Davis Jr. (Daniel J. Watts) informs the audiences of both the television studio and New York Theater Workshop, where the production is running. “No! Welcome to the fever dream.” The musical unfurls in the minutes before Cole (Dulé Hill) is supposed to go on the air.
Time dilates and contracts; guests and family members pop up; conversations are interspersed with musical standards. Davis, who had actually guest-starred on Cole’s show a few months earlier, is ever-present here as a flamboyantly extroverted jester who might represent the id of the more restrained (at least publicly) Cole. The pinnacle of McGregor’s production is a fiery tap number, choreographed by Jared Grimes, between the two men that lands halfway between duet and battle, and is set to “Me and My Shadow.”
Juxtaposing an irrepressible scratcher of itches and a debonair charmer as two forces of Black creativity, which the white establishment tried to contain in safe, acceptable boxes, is the show’s best idea. Hill gives it life with a complex, layered performance as Cole, who is revealed to be channeling his anger and frustrations into a smooth, urbane exterior — a review of his show’s premiere in The New York Times described him as having “an amiable personality that comes across engagingly on the television screen.” (Both Hill and Watts were in the “Lights Out” premiere in 2017, with the People’s Light company in Malvern, Penn.)
Unfortunately, the writing and direction do not match Hill’s subtlety. Cole is jostled this way and that between past and present, fantasy and reality, as if he were on a runaway carousel, but his agitated free associating is written and staged in a herky-jerky manner. Guests including Peggy Lee (Ruby Lewis) and Eartha Kitt (Krystal Joy Brown) turn up, though their musical contributions feel perfunctory. The star’s mother, Perlina (Kenita Miller), drops by. Cole manifests his younger self (Mekhi Richardson at the performance I attended), and also duets with his daughter, Natalie (Brown again), on “Unforgettable” — a hit for Natalie in 1991, when she sang with her father via a recording he had made 40 years earlier.
The intersection of personal history, politics and performance has long been an essential part of Domingo’s work as a writer — he explored it successfully in his autobiographical play “A Boy and His Soul” (2009), less effectively in the book he co-wrote for “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (2018). Here he and McGregor resort to telegraphing in ways that may be intended to jolt but too often land awkwardly, as when Natalie cries “I can’t breathe” after she is brutally forced to smoke a cigarette from a sponsor brand.
“They are still digging Emmett Till’s grave, and you’re out here planting roses,” Davis hectors Cole, who replies that his job is to entertain.
“No, it’s your job to reflect the times,” Davis continues. “But, if that’s what you are trying to teach the kids, young Billy Preston is waiting in the wings, ready to do his thing.”
Lo and behold, the keyboard prodigy (Richardson, again), then 11, comes in for “Blueberry Hill.”
It’s an excellent number, as many are in “Lights Out,” though one wishes the money spent on a large, underused video screen had been dedicated to a few more musicians to better approximate the bold, pumping sound of Nelson Riddle’s orchestra on the TV show. Still, it is in examinations of such performers as Cole that you find one of the keys to change and progress: a demonstration of unparalleled talent that could not be stifled.
Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole
Through June 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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