Rep’s ‘Black Pearl’ at its best when singing
On a hot July day in 1933, musicologist John Lomax and his 18-year-old son Alan — traveling throughout the South to gather and preserve American song — arrived at Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary and met 45year-old Huddie Ledbetter. We know him as Lead Belly; his bluesy folk music would influence musicians from Woody Guthrie to the Rolling Stones.
Change gender and tweak some facts and that’s the story being told in Frank Higgins’ “Black Pearl Sings!,” a straight play with plenty of music that opened Sunday night in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret. Directed by Leda Hoffmann, it features Lynette DuPree as Pearl and American Players Theatre’s Colleen Madden as the musicologist who finds her.
This odd couple seemingly have nothing in common.
Unlike Lomax, who grew up poor on a Texas farm, the Radcliffe-educated Susannah (Madden) is a prim and tightly wound bluestocking who has rejected her upbringing to save souls — her way of describing what it means to rescue songs and their singers from obscurity. She’s experienced and tough, even if her missionary fervor can make her naïve about her acts of appropriation.
Pearl is in the pen for murdering a man she insists deserved what he got. She’s tough, too — and wary, given a lifetime of broken promises made by white folks. As embodied by DuPree, she can sing; DuPree’s voice reminds me of a Lomax note from that 1933 summer, describing “music in that cry, and mystery, and wistful sadness.”
But Pearl isn’t sure she wants to sing
Colleen Madden (left) and Lynette DuPree have little in common in "Black Pearl Sings!," performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
for Susannah.
Higgins’ story of how and why she ultimately does is both clunky and incredible, right from that belief-defying opening moment when Susannah somehow interviews Pearl alone, with nary a guard in sight. Much of Higgins’ script is driven by Pearl’s search for a missing and never seen daughter; as used here, it’s a hoary and manipulatively maudlin plot device.
Higgins fares no better when trying to balance his show by investing Susannah with troubles of her own, including chronic underfunding and the discrimination she’s faced in academia as a woman. Genuine as such struggles would have been for one in Susannah’s shoes, her quest for Harvard tenure can seem weightless, even when presented by one of Wisconsin’s best actors. Susannah gets it right when she tells Pearl during one of their periodic arguments that “we get along better when we sing.”
While most of that singing gets done by DuPree, both actors are impressive in giving us a cappella renditions of folk, blues and gospel that range from children’s songs to the soulful “No More Auction Block for Me” while also whisking us to Ireland and to Africa. Would that Higgins’ script had moved as well or as far as the music it commemorates.
“Black Pearl Sings!” continues through March 18 at the Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com or call (414) 2249490. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.