Back at the start of this century, Tom Stoppard raised some eyebrows with the copious program notes theatergoers received at his brainy Broadway play “The Invention of Love.” The Times review advised reading them, as context for understanding the performance, “before the curtain goes up.”
Audience members traipsing onto Little Island in Manhattan for the handsome revival of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s “The Gospel at Colonus” don’t get anything of the kind, but it would have been a help. An aurally sumptuous quasi-Passion play that sings hallelujah to the heavens in the island’s open-air amphitheater, the show retells an ancient Greek drama through the prism of a Black Pentecostal church service.
“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” the Preacher (Stephanie Berry) says at the beginning, with the Hudson River glinting as a backdrop in lieu of an upstage wall. “I take as my text this evening the Book of Oedipus.”
It is a clever line. But while a pastor might be able to presume a congregation’s familiarity with a book of the Bible, it is riskier to count on a crowd knowing Sophocles’ drama “Oedipus at Colonus.” Breuer, the great downtown experimentalist who died in 2021, was all about risk. Still, let’s recap, shall we?
In “Oedipus at Colonus,” Oedipus is old, infamous and exiled from Thebes, where he once was king. His life has been a litany of scandals, which you might recall from another of Sophocles’ Theban tragedies, “Oedipus Rex”: Abandoned as an infant, he did not know his parents, so when he later killed his father in a fight, he didn’t realize who it was, and when he married his mother and had children with her, he likewise had no idea. After learning the truth, he gouged his eyes out.
Now, in his wanderings, his beloved daughter Antigone is his indispensable guide. Upon their arrival at Colonus, Theseus, the king of Athens, takes pity and offers them sanctuary.
Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, “The Gospel at Colonus” is a musical that would raise the rafters if there were rafters to be raised. On a balmy summer night, with a gorgeous choir in full voice and an on-point orchestra complete with an organ and a horn section, the Amph at Little Island is an enviable place to be. (Music direction is by James Hall and Dionne McClain-Freeney.)
In an inspired stroke of casting, a jazz vocalist from an older generation (Frank Senior) and an operatic bass-baritone from a younger one (Davóne Tines) share the role of Singer Oedipus — Senior bringing depth, Tines muscularity. Purely in concert terms, this show is an oasis of high-octane joy.
Visually, too, it’s a pleasure: David Zinn’s set, with bold pink carpet runners forming a giant cross on the floor, and Montana Levi Blanco’s drapey costumes, whose periwinkle often turns to lilac under Stacey Derosier’s lights — an amped-up take on a Lenten palette.
In the storytelling, though, the production fumbles. On Friday night, the cast seemed under-rehearsed, not always confident of their lines, and the mics were frustratingly spotty. Strangely, the lighting frequently does not direct our gaze; I repeatedly found myself searching the stage to see which soloist, amid the large cast, was singing.
And I suspect that much of the audience, that night, had no idea for most of the performance which character was Theseus (Kim Burrell), an important role. The introductory line that would have clued us in — Antigone’s “Father, Theseus has come!” — was somehow never spoken.
It is a difficult show to pull off, not least because the Preacher also sometimes plays Oedipus, and it is not always clear here which mode the Preacher is in. But Chowdhury does make some lovely tableaux of the three Oedipi (Berry, Senior and Tines), linking them by touch — an unmistakable trinity. Beside them, her hair loosely hooded in blue, Antigone (Samantha Howard) looks every inch the Madonna.
Characterization and relationships get lost in this production, though Kevin Bond is an exception as Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law, who makes a swift, indelible impression as an almost pantomime villain.
But his kidnapping of Antigone and her sister, Ismene (Ayana George Jackson), barely registers, because while they are precious to Oedipus, the staging minimizes that. And when Oedipus dies (not a spoiler; it has been more than 2,400 years), his daughters’ grief has no heft.
The ambition here is great, the talent considerable, the result less than the sum of its myriad parts. What will move you is the music. It is flat-out glorious.
The Gospel at Colonus
Through July 26 in the Amph at Little Island, Manhattan; littleisland.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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