HSPVA HONORS HARLEM’S MUSICAL WAKANDA
Halfway through a deep dive into the ’80s boy band New Edition, in which a reincarnated Ralph Tresvant seduces a front-row audience member with “Sensitivity,” one realizes that the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts’ “At the Apollo” is not your typical high school Black History Month project.
Maybe the revelation came earlier, when senior Payton Alix, who had just impersonated Cab Calloway in a speedy rendition of “Minnie the Moocher,” returns to the stage as MC Hammer and dances with such explosive elegance that, for a brief moment, parachute pants seem cool again.
Or perhaps it was when the unassuming Sarah-Grace Kimberly takes the microphone and you think, “Really, a small white girl singing Chaka Khan?” But then the high school freshman, who had spent the evening playing trumpet in the back of the stage, opens her mouth and, well — is “slay” an appropriate word for someone’s interpretation of “Sweet Thing”?
Because if “At the Apollo” was billed as an “American Idol” contest, Kimberly might have won, but she’d have had also to compete with Zachary Hall, cast as a time-traveling janitor, opening the show with a karaoke version of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.” Or Crishard Moore and Dedereck Carr, singing as Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, respectively, in a musical battle hosted by Steve Harvey (John Hall) called “Sightful Visionaries.”
Or Royce Shaw, whose Louis Armstrong impression was so accurately raspy and cartoonish, the sight of Shaw doing it wasn’t just impressive, it was mind-boggling.
After all, “At the Apollo,” written and directed by Broderick Jones, choreographed by Courtney Jones and music directed by Stephanie York Blue, had nearly every element you’d want in a high school production — a full jazz band, modern, jazz and hip-hop dance showcases, a historical lesson, a dramatic play and a vocal sing-off. Mainly a talent delivery mechanism for the school that produced Jason Moran, Eric Harland and Robert Glasper, “At the Apollo” also told a semi-historical story about a family’s effort to revive the theater.
So the “American Idol”-caliber barrage of talent had a point — the uplift of the most important venue in African-American performing arts. The story centered on the infighting between three members of the Sutton family, who owned the Apollo after its heyday. The sisters are an excavation of black female complexity. Nikki, played by Tori Hicks, is the dimwit (think Karen from “Mean Girls”). Margo, played by Nia Paul, is the bougie girl who attends galas, dates a white boy and gets called Stacey Dash. Angie, played by Chloe Browns, is Margo’s opposite — proud, militant, black.
Hall’s janitor-meets-geniemeets-narrator sends the sisters back in time to convince them the Apollo shouldn’t be sold to a developer. From an audience standpoint, the argument’s won in a few songs into Act 1’s 1930s medley.
Act 2, billed as a fundraiser, is a “best of” album come to life that bursts into existence with Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” re-created with blue hazy lights, lithe black uniforms and Jackson’s signature militaristic cap and vest. That immediate transition from 1930s classicism to peak late’80s dance-pop had a Wakandan quality to it — the Apollo, the “Rhythm Nation” performance suggested, is a cultural mecca whose relevance spans all eras.
The second act of “At the Apollo” reminded me of the performance showcases held at the end of the semester by cultural clubs in college. The Korean or Chinese club would begin the night with traditional song and dance — Asian classical music, if you will — then crowd-please at the end with renditions of, say, Wonder Girls or Jay Chou.
Except African-American music history is not siloed like the Eastern old and Western new of Asian pop, nor was the “classic” set on Friday night at HSPVA as weighed down by due diligence as a Chinese fan dance. There is no clear historical separation between the school’s performances of “Jumpin’ Jive,” “Stop in the Name of Love” and “The Boy Is Mine.”
The time-jumping jukebox of “At the Apollo” showed us that even if all Apollo alumni are not created equal, they put down their footprint in the same sand nevertheless. Both Louis Armstrong and Ralph Tresvant played at Harlem’s musical Wakanda, both are part of the same pop tapestry and both are all worthy of a Black History Month tribute by Houston’s finest high school entertainers.
You can showcase the founding fathers of jazz, in other words, and still leave some room for “Sensitivity.”