The/King/Operetta
nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
July 5, 2007
The Last Year in the Life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as Devised by Waterwell: A Rock Operetta (aka The/King/Operetta) feels destined for greatness.
I've been watching the members of the theatre company Waterwell grow as creators and performers over the past few years, and with this show they break out and break new ground. Perhaps the significance of their subject helped inspire them to make a piece that is mature, meaningful, timely, and entirely entertaining. There's still some work that might be done to The/King/Operetta to make it diamond-sharp, and I hope some enterprising and visionary producers will come forward to facilitate the transformation of this amazing late-night rock/theatre show into the next hit and milestone of American musical theatre.
But you should see it now, because it's very, very good (and, at $25, a genuine bargain). It tells the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final year, in theatrical songs and sketches; the neo-vaudevillian perspective that is Waterwell's trademark is applied here to an idealist caught up in the machinery of history and politics. The play begins, uncompromisingly, with King's April 4, 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam," delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City:
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, and say: "This is not just." A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just."
[Note: read the entire text of King's speech here; Waterwell has abridged it considerably for their own dramatic purposes.]
The/King/Operetta next provides context for this man who seemed to be transforming himself from a Civil Rights leader to a Human Rights leader: we meet his enemies, President Johnson and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; we meet his friends and supporters in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and we meet the people he inspired and spoke for, in the American South and within urban ghettoes, and, perhaps less obviously, on college campuses. We watch a hippie compose this song, which feels even more resonant now than it would have 40 years ago:
There's a war in Vietnam
And it's wrong and it's bad
There's a war in Vietnam
And I don't like it....I'm a guy who doesn't know
What to say or where to go
I'm a guy who doesn't know
What he can do
Using found material and juxtaposing it with/interpreting it in a variety of styles—some contemporary, some contemporaneous—Waterwell paints a picture of an America then that feels a lot like America now. They give us King, warts and all (there's an interesting scene in which Coretta King interrogates her husband, obviously turning up at home way beyond schedule). And they remind us that the courageous leadership that Dr. King provided unflinchingly is precisely what's missing from the state of our union.
Attribution would be useful (perhaps in a program note), to help us sort the facts, of which many are provided, from the interpretation, of which there is also a good deal. I'd have also preferred to see Hoover taken more seriously, because he was a pretty serious guy; instead, there's an inevitable drag number (performed with comic flourish by Kevin Townley) near the end of the show. Many of the liberties taken with history land decisively as satire, though, especially King's appearance on the "Toni Fortuna Show," which features Hanna Cheek as the most extreme hack TV talk show host imaginable. Funny, pointed stuff.
Lauren Cregor's score, influenced by all the musical styles pervasive in the late '60s from gospel to funk to rock, is excellent, and splendidly played by a four-piece band led by Cregor herself. Rodney Gardiner gives a spectacular performance as King, transcending mere impersonation to create a full-blooded character that feels organic and authentic. His fellow Waterwellians—the aforementioned Cheek and Townley, plus Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely, play a variety of supporting roles with brio (Ridgely is particularly priceless as the silliest of three backup singers on the Toni Fortuna Show). Ridgely also directs, with a sure hand.
The/King/Operetta founders in its final scenes, as King's imminent assassination begins to overshadow the play's other themes: the piece sort of morphs into a modern-day Jesus Christ Superstar, concerned solely with its hero's transformation into a reluctant martyr.
But this is a worthy, well-crafted show, one that has the makings of something really groundbreaking. It's a work of musical theatre that doesn't just sing and dance around an important theme; it makes us listen and pay attention. Certainly the words they've chosen for us to hear—those of Martin Luther King, Jr.—are as relevant and inspiring as ever.
