We feel his pain right at the top of the show.
Writer-composer Cesar Alvarez has been commissioned to write a musical he doesn’t really want to write. And for good reason: How do you write a show about an ambush, led by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis (the National Socialist Party of America) who shot to death five communist union organizers? Alvarez’s parents were among the survivors of the massacre, and named their son after Cesar Cauce, one of those murdered in Greensboro, N.C., on Nov. 3, 1979. It’s a violent episode that shaped the Alvarez family, and none of them have ever been able to escape it.
Alvarez’s “The Potluck” opened Monday at Playwrights Horizons, and the author’s immediate anxiety has little to do with all that went down even before he was born nearly half a century ago. Speaking directly to the audience, Alvarez expresses severe misgivings about writing such a political musical, and would really rather being working on something more conventional as tuners go. However, producers loved this Greensboro concept, and now their $15,000 commission fee is on the line. Alvarez needs the money.
“The Potluck” begins with what’s ostensibly a stand-up comedy routine, delivered with enormous charm by Alvarez. An intern named the gender-neutral Moss (Jasmine Rafael) soon appears to help Alvarez with the project, and they ask each other why there are so many musicals about Nazis. Faster than you can say “Cabaret,” Liza Minnelli and the Mother Superior from “The Sound of Music” show up to perform a song-and-dance showstopper (“Let’s Make a Drama”) that’s snatched from some very low-budget staging of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”
This glitzy bonhomie doesn’t last any longer than Alvarez’s opening monologue or the tete-a-tete between Alvarez and Moss, who now switches the show’s gears (again!) to tell us about a documentary made by Alvarez’s mother years ago. Moss pulls down a movie screen, but warns that they will not be sticking around to see “Red November Black November.” It’s just too disturbing. We can join this intern in the lobby for a memorial “ritual” – or we can watch a few of the film’s grizzlier minutes. Alvarez insists that seeing his mother’s doc about the Greensboro massacre is not essential to understanding the remainder of “The Potluck.”
Moss isn’t kidding. The documentary is, indeed, graphic and horrifying. Not only do the Nazis and the KKK ambush the communists, who are staging a “Death to the Klan” march; the Greensboro police force is totally missing in action on purpose and don’t arrive until long after the shootings take place.
We’re over half an hour into “The Potluck” and been treated, so far, to exactly that one song featuring Liza and the nun and a really violent documentary. If there’s a more loosey-goosey show, I’ve never seen it. The damned thing keeps changing tone every 10 minutes, and when Alvarez sings the touching “Ballad of the 5,” Moss the intern is over in the corner eating Chinese and Alvarez’s parents (Barbara Walsh and Ruben Flores) are on the other side of the stage in a kitchen, cooking up a vegetarian paella dish for an upcoming dinner. The word “potluck” in the show’s title refers more to the show’s structure than anything someone’s going to eat.
Usually, when an audience gets jerked around like this, a palpable frustration invades the theater. Not so with “The Potluck.”
It’s clear why someone found the Greensboro concept intriguing enough to want to commission it, to turn it into a musical. There’s a lot to unpack: the Nazis and the Klan hated each other. Why did they join forces for the very first time in 1979 in Greensboro? And what did the union organizers expect to achieve by staging something as incendiary as a “Death to the Klan” march?
And then there’s Cesar Alvarez. “The Potluck” is autobiographical, and it tells quite a life story. Alvarez is nonbinary, has three kids with a life partner named Emily, and teaches music at Dartmouth College. Queers have historically been ostracized not only by Nazis and the Klan but also communists like Alvarez’s parents. It’s difficult to tell what troubles Alvarez more, that LGBTQ+ status or being named after Cesar Cauce.
Does “The Potluck” ever come into focus? Absolutely. Alvarez tells the story in seemingly unrelated but fascinating dollops of information that coalesce when they sings “The Ballad of the 5,” that memorial to the five martyrs. It’s also a seance of sorts that conjures up the five ghosts (Jacob Brandt, Andrew R. Butler, Dionne McClain-Freeney, Gian Perez and Zack Segel) who materialize on stage from a place that no theatergoer would ever expect. It’s a great coup de theatre written by Alvarez and staged by director Sarah Benson. Emily Orling’s scenic design also achieves a major metamorphosis.
Alvarez’s songwriting talent runs the gamut. The eclectic score includes a torch song (“Lavender Shirt”) sung by Alvarez in drag with full beard, a song that sums up the wondrousness of complicated psyches. Dad delivers a plaintive, upbeat ballad (“Mandela”) to his dead best friend that mentions all the wonderful things (Mandela is elected president of South Africa) and terrible things (climate change) that happened after 1979. And Mom sings a social-justice anthem (“The Myth”) that is unlike all the other loud, pompous anthems that infect today’s musical theater. If there’s such a thing as a quiet anthem, “The Myth” is it.
“The Potluck” is presented by Soho Rep. and INTAR.
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