In November 1956, Nat King Cole was given his own variety show on NBC. It drew major guest stars and got good ratings, but was abandoned just over a year later because it couldn’t secure a single national sponsor; brands were too nervous about boycotts from racist viewers.
“Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” Cole observed at the time.
He couldn’t have been too shocked. Cole may have been one of the biggest pop stars of his time, charting 86 singles and 17 albums in the Top 40, but he was, after all, the first Black man to host a nationally broadcast program. (He referred to himself as “the Jackie Robinson of television.”) In 1948, when he moved into Los Angeles’s all-white Hancock Park neighborhood, a cross was burned on his lawn. A few months before the TV show debuted, Ku Klux Klansmen attacked him onstage at his concert in Birmingham, Ala., shoving him off his piano bench.
Those experiences and the story of the final episode of “The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” in December 1957 is now the focus of “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole,” which is running through June 29 at New York Theater Workshop. Written by Colman Domingo, an Academy Award nominee for “Rustin” and “Sing Sing,” and Patricia McGregor, the theater’s artistic director and the show’s director, the play had a long gestation period, premiering in Philadelphia in 2017. It also had a Los Angeles run in 2019.
Domingo described “Lights Out,” which stars Dulé Hill as Cole, as a “dark night of the soul” that explores “the psychology of an artist.”
Though today he’s best known for his recording of the holiday perennial “The Christmas Song” and for his daughter Natalie’s technology-assisted duet with him, “Unforgettable” (from her Grammy-winning album of songs associated with her father), Cole was an astonishing talent.
“With the sole exception of Louis Armstrong,” wrote the critic and historian Terry Teachout, “he is the only major jazz musician to have been identically distinguished and influential as both an instrumentalist and a vocalist.”
Ray Charles inducted Cole into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Frank Sinatra was a fan (and a pallbearer at Cole’s funeral) and the piano titan Bill Evans called him “probably the most underrated jazz pianist in the history of jazz.”
Cole’s relationship to race, though, was complicated, even confounding. He performed with an interracial band in the South, but also agreed to play for segregated audiences, to the dismay of his Black fans. He had a key role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington and at the time of his death in 1965 (from lung cancer at the age of 45), he was planning a production of James Baldwin’s play “Amen Corner.”
“I try to please as many people as I possibly can,” Cole once said, “and if I find the people like certain things, I try to give them what they like. And that’s good business, too.”
McGregor said that the “fever dream” structure of “Lights Out” follows the “past, present and imagining of the future” at a critical moment in Cole’s story, with Sammy Davis Jr., a frequent guest on the TV show, serving as a “trickster provocateur” poking at Cole’s conscience.
Domingo, who is also developing a movie about Cole that he called a “more traditional biopic,” added that the show re-examines the musician’s place in history.
“He knew the power of television,” he said. “He knew that’s part of the revolution as well. By showing up, putting on a tie, being graceful, singing lovely songs, he was actually advancing who we are as Americans.”
In a recent video call (McGregor from home, Domingo from his dressing room on his last day of shooting a science fiction film, as yet untitled, directed by Steven Spielberg), the collaborators spoke about five songs that are central to the show and to Nat King Cole’s groundbreaking career. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1948
‘Nature Boy’
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
McGREGOR “Nature Boy” was wildly popular, but there’s something melancholy and strange in it that is a revelation of what was churning underneath Nat. We use that song to open up a portal into another world, into a different theatrical reality. It was very well known, but it’s very different than most of his songs, which kind of wrapped you in this velvet hug. Its strangeness and its mystery felt like a really great song to establish that we weren’t just going to show the on-air side of Nat, but it was going to be a revelation of his interior.
DOMINGO It feels very personal and really an existential question that Nat has.
1943
‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
McGREGOR You can just swing and snap your fingers. It sounds like something out of “Ocean’s 11.” But it’s also a kind of warning tale. Nat’s father was a preacher, and this song links him to the way in which his father used the pulpit. If you peel back the layers a little bit, there’s some lessons about strategies for survival and the way in which people wear masks.
DOMINGO It’s the idea of his psyche, of what has built the person that you are. Sometimes at those critical moments, you have to go back, and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute — this is the lesson that my father gave me, the lesson that my mother gave me.”
McGREGOR Colman is at an incredible moment in his career, and he chooses to do a piece like “Sing Sing” when he could be doing “Transformers 17.” But that’s one of the things that this piece asks: When you have a platform, what do you say?
1951
‘Unforgettable’
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
DOMINGO Of course, everyone remembers the fantastic album that Natalie Cole did as a tribute to her father, and “Unforgettable” was a huge part of it. So what does Natalie put into this? What is her legacy? And his heartache of, was he there enough? Was he the right father? We watch Natalie transition from a 15-year-old girl to the Natalie Cole that we know, but we also know the complicated cost of that legacy for her.
McGREGOR In that song, Natalie gives him permission to share his inner turmoil. The show posits that in trying to hold it all together, the stress and worry might have led to him passing earlier than he should have. In her own project, Natalie was trying to be in conversation with a father who passed too young, and to release him to be free — and know that even though their time was cut short, he would always be unforgettable in her mind’s eye.
1946
‘The Christmas Song’
DOMINGO By the time you get to “The Christmas Song,” you’ve learned so much, and it’s disrupted you in a way that you’re going to hear the song in a very different way. Dulé is sweating and tear-soaked, and he’s finally experienced and let go of some rage and some hurt. And then we deliver “The Christmas Song,” but now you have a more vulnerable human being in front of you. You don’t get to walk out with just that warm, cozy feeling. We’re not allowing you to.
McGREGOR It’s the sentiment of how to be Black without all the blues. Now you understand the cost of grace in the face of American history and reality. You understand that there is no way to avoid the pain and the rage, and yet people still try to show up with hope and healing and connection. That song is like the crème brûlée top, with something much deeper underneath.
1957
‘The Party’s Over’
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
DOMINGO The show ends when Nat speaks his truth, but it’s cut off with darkness. Then that’s our coda — “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day / They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away.” We have deconstructed this American icon to deconstruct America and deconstruct our souls. We’ve done our show, we’ve taken off our masks. Now it’s your choice whether you speak your truth, whether you are active, where’s your part in this revolution to liberate one another? We’ve done our job. Now it’s your turn.
McGREGOR In many ways, this show also examines the role artists play. If people leave the theater and just talk about what kind of dessert they want, we haven’t done our job. We hope people leave with a sense of mission or something churning in them to figure out what it means for them to unmask, to take off their makeup, to wake up.
The post What Made Nat King Cole, and These 5 Songs, Unforgettable appeared first on New York Times.
