November 4–11, 1999

theater

Shining Moment

The extraordinary life and music of Dinah Washington is beautifully illuminated at PTC.

by David Anthony Fox

Dinah Was

Philadelphia Theatre Company at Plays & Players, 1714 Delancey St., through Nov. 20, 215-569-9700

In her too-short life, Dinah Washington, one of the century’s greatest blues and jazz singers, did everything to extremes: swear, drink, self-medicate, marry, divorce, exult, grieve — and, of course, make music.

Washington’s unmistakable voice was raw, raucous and trumpeting. This was not a sound (or a life story) for the easy-listening crowd. In the 1950s and ’60s when her near-contemporaries Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were winning mixed audiences with their mellower styles, there was only one option open to Washington to reach the greater general acceptance she craved: compromise.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. Dinah Was is the highly satisfying concert-play that explores Washington’s life and music. As a piece of theater it joins similar works based on the lives of modern musicians, and like most of them it is not entirely free of clichés (did every great singer have to fight dubious managers to make their most famous records?). But more often, the script of Dinah Was (by Oliver Goldstick) impresses for its terse, muscular storytelling and its sophistication. Consider the framing device, with Washington seated atop her suitcases in the lobby of Las Vegas’ Sahara Hotel. She has been contracted to perform there, but as an African American she cannot stay there and she and the management are at a stalemate. The situation will resolve itself, not the way the audience wants, but the only way it can: with Dinah, who has already made enough concessions in her life, not turning back. Only the play’s penultimate scene, where Washington befriends a young black hotel worker and discovers that the girl is a superb singer, strikes a genuinely false note.

Some of Dinah’s success is due to splendid direction (by David Petrarca) and design (sets by Michael Yeargan, lights by Robert Perry/Stephen Strawbridge, costumes by Paul Tazewell). Again the choices are spare and powerful. Petrarca finds exactly the right rhythm for each scene (spoken and musical). And finally a scenic artist that makes a virtue of economy! Michael Yeargan’s visual world is a simple series of icons — a jazz band in a smoky, dark blue-box, a white mink coat on a dressmaker’s form — that evoke the elegant essentials of Washington’s glamorous, troubled life.

But it’s Dinah’s cast of musicans and actors that lifts the show to triumph. Among an ensemble of good performers who play multiple roles, special mention must be made of Carla J. Hargrove, who acts well and pulls off the evening’s surprise coup-de-théatre and Darryl Alan Reed, who must sing, play piano and saxophone and act — and does all with skill and finesse. An accompanying jazz quartet offers excellent support.

Best for last: E. Faye Butler as Dinah. From the moment she arrives she’s a powerhouse — actress enough to be effective even without singing a note; singer enough to command any stage as a purely musical performer. Butler doesn’t really sound like Washington, but so what? Nobody does, and what’s more important is that she’s a hell of a performer in her own right and her style captures some of the same incendiary gleam and drive of her role model. On opening night, a momentary lighting glitch plunged Butler into shadow during one of her songs. It was hardly noticeable; Butler has incandescence to spare.