Hire the avant-garde disrupter Taylor Mac to write the book for a Broadway musical and you aren’t going to get a conventional tuner. To wit, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” opens in early-1990s Savannah, Georgia, with several minutes of total silence. It replaces the original authorial voice of the journalist John Berendt (who sold 4 million copies of his 1994 book) with a many-headed audience hydra and ends with everyone in the theater happily ripping apart their show programs on the command of The Lady Chablis, who has traveled forward in time to know she is now being played by J. Harrison Ghee.
That’s not your grandmother’s “Garden of Good and Evil” playing at the Goodman Theatre. And certainly not Clint Eastwood’s 1997 movie, either.
This show, evocatively designed by Christopher Oram, is something new, weird and gutsy enough to jettison most conventional expectations. Like many pre-Broadway tryouts, it has its strengths and weaknesses and a wildly uneven second half of a second act that suggests everyone simply ran out of enough time to fashion an ending that really satisfies.
The strengths? There are two. One is the truly fabulous performance of Ghee as The Lady Chablis, a transgender Savannah performer who was but a minor character in Berendt’s original work, which was an observational, mostly factual travelogue that flowed from his obsession with the people of Georgia’s most interesting city.
There’s nothing minor about Chablis’ role here: Ghee commands the stage with so much zest, brio and life that everything else feels sepia-toned by comparison. The Tony Award-winning star of “Some Like It Hot” offers the chance for Chicagoans to see (again) a formidable talent now in their physical prime — capable of top-notch singing and dancing and who comes complete with a star’s ability to charm an audience with patter and personality. Yet nothing about Ghee is mannered or fussy in the way of, say, an over-emotional Tony Awards acceptance speech; on the contrary, the work is disciplined, concise and immaculately crafted. A rare thing in a brand-new musical.
The second strength is the restless and overstuffed Jason Robert Brown score, filled with enough thrilling musical ideas and rich, sensual pleasures for three musicals. Brown didn’t try to integrate a traditional score but rather to voice as distinctly as possible the show’s competing populations of affluent middle-aged women, Black debutantes, gay lovers, spiritual seekers and, of course, the cabaret stylings of M’Lady herself. As a result, Brown fans get to hear their composer not just at his peak, which surely is the case, but working in an uncommonly wide variety of styles in a single show. You hear his signature anchors but also much that feels fresh and new.
The show, directed by Rob Ashford and featuring eye-popping costumes from Toni-Leslie James, has a lot of music: I believe I counted around 20 songs at Monday night’s opening, sans reprises, although word is that they’ve been coming and going during the preview period and likely will morph some more. (There’s room to cut, too, especially if that could mean more room for Tanya Birl-Torres’ choreography, which feels siphoned off to the show’s edges.) Ghee is the lucky recipient of many a gift from Brown and so are we. His lyrics are often wickedly amusing: “There no Aaron Burr here, just Johnny Mercer,” goes one clever rhyme.
The show’s fundamental weakness? It has taken a book written from an ironic, outsider perspective with all characters treated equally and so stacked the deck in favor of the anti-establishment outsiders, most notably The Lady Chablis, that A), the Southern white women of Savannah become unexplained, overwrought stereotypes good for only a couple of jokes and B), the transgressive characters thus have nothing credible to struggle against.
The fix will take some courage and will go against the easy choice for 2024 Broadway but actually is not that hard: Take away the Margaret Thatcher coifs and the pursed lips and make the women feel real, which means showing us their pain.
Brown knows how to do this. He did it brilliantly in “Parade.” With devastating impact.
He even has a potentially beautiful song here, “Since My Mama Died,” which I thought for the first few measures was going to really probe one of the dirty secrets of the antiques and home restoration businesses, which is how they often profit from the pain of the deceased. But the song demurs and the show refuses to be fair to these women; they’re just cheap jokes, even though the show has a woefully underused Sierra Boggess in its cast, for goodness sake, and she is one of the great Broadway sopranos with too little to sing. These women (also played by McKinley Carter, Jessica Molaskey and Mary Ernster) have to be made human. The real-life characters that Berendt met in Savannah may be dead now, but the point is that Savannah was saved from destruction by many hands, and fans of all the characters in the book will be the ones actually buying the expensive tickets to the show.
“Midnight” is, of course, a murder mystery with an apparent villain, the antiques dealer Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), and a victim, his troubled assistant Bobby Hutchins (Lance Roberts). When Hewitt is singing, the character is elevated and intriguing but there is not much smolder (or anything else, really) evident between the two; it is as if the show were afeared of really revealing the darker side of Savannah culture, which is surprising, frankly, given that Mac does not typically shy away from humans struggling with control. The show really needs to add that tension. The Lady Chablis keeps everyone happy and the thriller part, ideally, would actually thrill and that means a whole lot of work on the last part of the show, the trial sequence for Williams outlined in the book. At this juncture, the late storytelling becomes a kind of Hail Mary as the show introduces a few too many new rules.
It’s a relief when Ghee emerges from the wings with a smile, a laugh and another winning song.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”
When: Through Aug. 11
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $40-175 at 312-443-3800 and www.goodmantheatre.org
