On the surface, the ballroom scene and the Christian church make strange bedfellows, but consider their similarities: Both bless human beings with community, spread messages of love and transformation, and are training grounds for righteous talent. And both, lest we forget, have a fondness for a hand-held fan.
The new musical “Saturday Church,” playing at New York Theater Workshop, defends this idea. Though somewhat predictable in narrative, the show offers a bounty of infectious music and electric performances. It reminds audiences that theater is an act of liturgy.
“Saturday Church” centers on Ulysses, a New York City teen whose name is a cheeky hint at the internal odyssey ahead. Grieving his father, Ulysses (Bryson Battle of NBC’s “The Voice”) finds solace at St. Matthew’s Church, but is barred from the choir for being “flamboyant,” “flouncy,” “too much.” (Mind you, these are qualities I’d attribute to many a popular gospel soloist.)
Heading home one Sunday to his overworked mother, Amara (Kristolyn Lloyd), and devout Aunt Rose (Joaquina Kalukango), Ulysses meets Raymond (Jackson Kanawha Perry), who introduces him to Saturday Church, an L.G.B.T.Q. program inspired by the real-life St. Luke in the Fields Church in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood. There, Ulysses is taken under the wings of a new chosen family: the program’s matriarch, Eboni (the regal B Noel Thomas), and the young dolls Dijon (Caleb Quezon) and Heaven (Anania).
The encounter with Raymond in “Saturday Church” is a whiplash of a meet-cute, symptomatic of Damon Cardasis and James Ijames’s brusque script. (Cardasis, adapting his 2018 film of the same name, co-authors with Ijames, the Pulitzer Prize winner of another Black, gay coming-of-age play, “Fat Ham.”) In the translation to stage, something weakens — the dialogue is often direct to the point of artless. Without nuance to play with, the actors are disarmed of that ever-essential tool in theater: subtext.
The characters’ challenges make stops at expected traumatic checkpoints of a queer narrative — rejection (which religious Aunt Rose disguises as protection), physical and sexual assault, suicide — before the show culminates in a glittering ballroom scene, as stark and convenient as a Shakespearean wedding.
Audiences have become overly accustomed to this cycle of suffering, though in fairness to Cadarsis and Ijames, the issues they’ve penned remain ever-present. What is refreshing about “Saturday Church” is that Cardasis and Ijames resist making an enemy or a saint of either community. Ulysses is misunderstood by folks in Saturday and Sunday church, but still finds splendor in both.
An unimpeachable win for the production is the Tony Award winner J. Harrison Ghee (“Some Like It Hot”), who magnetically moonlights as two of Ulysses’s guides: Pastor Lewis and Black Jesus (as in, yes, the son of God). The latter serves Whitney Houston Fairy Godmother realness in Qween Jean’s luxe, glittering costumes and Dhairius Thomas’s drama-filled fluffy twist out wig.
Battle, 22, from North Carolina, is an industry newcomer. His vocals remain silken even when they reach for the rafters. His performance is wide-eyed and honey-dipped. We feel the joy when Ulysses tries his first brush of makeup and slips into heels; his thrill of self-expression becomes contagious.
The director Whitney White culls familiar vitality from this cast, as she did in other ensemble-heavy shows like “Liberation” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” At times, her stage pictures veer heavy-handed. For example, the repeated mirroring of Amara and Eboni as parallel mothers in grief, an obvious visual that echoes the script’s lack of finesse.
Fortunately, White has a strong handle on the show’s pulse — the voltaic score sourced from the pop sensation Sia’s catalog, plus tracks from the international DJ Honey Dijon. (I found myself racing to take notes a tempo.) The preexisting songs are adorned with fun electro-pop and stomp-clap gospel arrangements by Luke Solomon and Jason Michael Webb, and with tweaked lyrics by Cadarsis, Ijames and Sia, but they buckle under abrupt transitions.
We can feel “Saturday Church” contorting itself to fit songs that simply were not written with it in mind, a consequence of its status as an almost-jukebox musical. That’s not to say gospel and pop-inspired house aren’t perfect genres to tell this tale; they are. Thematically resonant and hypnotic, they steady their listeners even as the music sets them free.
The music and makers of “Saturday Church” aren’t here only to entertain; they arrive on a mission. They know that, too often, to be queer and Christian is to face judgment long before one’s appointed day. And telling queer stories remains a vital thing in a political moment when civil liberties for gay and trans people are under siege. “Saturday Church,” like the program that inspired it, is well-intentioned and anchored by two types of faith: in the body of Christ, yes, but also bodies on the dance floor.
Saturday Church
Through Oct. 19 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Sara Krulwich has been The Times’s theater photographer since 1995, photographing stage productions in New York. She joined The Times in 1979.
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