Not Enough Grit in Jelly's Gravy

 Jelly’s Last Jam at the Pasadena Playhouse is a beast of a production.

The remount of George C. Wolfe’s musical take on the life of Jelly Roll Morton originally premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1991. The show opens as Jelly Roll dies and is confronted with his legacy by the Chimney Man (think a cross between St. Peter and Charon, the ferryman across the river Styx). The Chimney Man has a particular bone to pick with Jelly Roll about his claims that he invented jazz but more pointedly his Creole boast that there wasn’t a black bone in his body. The two-hour musical takes us through the chapters of his life from New Orleans and the blues through the south and his musical development in Chicago, all the way until he’s finally stabbed in Los Angeles far from glory and fame. 

The music and dancing embedded in the journey are extraordinary though not without their challenges (more on that in a second).

The real challenge lies in the tightrope walk of the book and the character of Jelly Roll. As a redemptive tale, we ultimately have to root for him, but the dramatic drive of the musical is him renouncing his musical roots in Black America, as the Chimney Man constantly reminds us. As a character, we need to be so charmed by Jelly and so moved by pathos that he won’t even admit to himself that we’re ready to accept a final atonement mere seconds before the final curtain. That’s no small feat for an actor who’s also got to tap dance his way into our hearts and hold us for two hours.

It’s here where the Pasadena Playhouse production falls short and the reason is an unlucky alignment of artistic vision and physical design — or to be more specific, sound design.

The artistic challenge that the Chimney Man himself gives us — “Ya gotta have grit to go with the gravy-ya gotta have pain, to go with the song.” — there’s plenty of song in this production but not enough grit. It feels a bit like the pretty version of the story rather than the gritty version — the difference between the Disneyland New Orleans and the actual 9th Ward. We need less of the former because without the pain, the chapters of Jelly Roll’s life are played at rather than experienced. It’s like that old blues saying, "You can’t play the blues, you have to live them." This production lacks the low end.

Sadly, that’s echoed, pun intended, in the show's sound design. Despite the show's faults, the performers are better than they sound. The sound design for this show isn’t providing enough oomph for this theater. It’s lacking both the punch and the bass to feel present and make an impression. A perfect example is the fantastic on-stage band we don’t see until 20 minutes in. You’d be forgiven if you thought the performers were singing to canned tracks in those opening numbers. The sound support makes the band sound like recorded music rather than the stunning ensemble they are. It’s even worse when it comes to the vocal mics which lack the full, deep sound this show requires. In some numbers, you can feel the performers pushing to make up for what they know the audience is missing. 

So, is it worth the drive to Pasadena?

If you love the music, yes. If you’ve never seen it, yes. If you were lucky enough to see the original either at the Taper or on Broadway? Probably not, linger in that sweet memory.

All that said, Pasadena Playhouse is doing something important: doing a musical of this scale just for a local audience. The ensemble is fantastic, the choreography is great, it just lacks that punch in the gut that makes the music sing.

Jelly’s Last Jam plays at the Pasadena Playhouse through June 23rd.

This is Anthony Byrnes opening the curtain on LA theater for KCRW.

Did the pandemic make the Hollywood Fringe Festival relevant?

[Written last year for Fringe 2023 but it's even truer this year.]

If you've been reading or listening to me for a while, you know I haven't historically been a fan of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. It's not that I don't love Fringe festivals (I do). It's just that I was never really sure how a Fringe festival fit into Los Angeles theater.

The pandemic may have changed all that.

If you've never been to a Fringe festival, I'll point you back to how I described it in 2018:

If you've never done the Fringe, it's like doing a tasting menu with a drunk chef. Everything happens quickly, some things are brilliant, some experiments are catastrophes, and almost everything goes better with a wine pairing.

The idea behind the Hollywood Fringe Festival (like most Fringe festivals) is quantity and compression. It's a lot of small shows (many less than an hour), playing throughout a couple of miles of Hollywood, and scheduled so you can see two or three shows on the same day. The fun of the Fringe is the tasting menu experience — not one singular remarkable thing but a variety of interesting things, one after the other. To get that experience, you need to make a day of it — or at least a full evening — and see at least three shows. The hardest part is the sheer volume of shows. Picking what you want to see and scheduling them so you don't have any overlap can be difficult. 

A lot of this still holds true (especially the wine pairing).

My pre-pandemic gripe with the Hollywood Fringe was: Where did it fit in LA theater? With a hearty 99-seat theater scene and other theater opportunities galore, wasn't all of LA's intimate theater really just one big, year-round Fringe festival? Wasn't the Fringe Festival just serving the faithful in smaller and smaller doses and offering quantity over quality? LA's version of the Fringe didn't seem to be growing an audience for theater more broadly and it lacked the national or international draw of other Fringe festivals. This wasn't a chance to see the best of Fringe from across the circuit of national or international festivals, it was a predominately local festival. My biggest complaint accompanied the best shows. More than once I saw something incredible at Fringe that played a couple of performances and then vanished. As I said back in 2012, "I love the ephemeral nature of the theater as much as the next guy, but shouldn’t there be something more?"

What, I asked smugly, was really the point?

Well, things have changed.

Post-pandemic, LA Theater looks very different. Between the loss of theater companies, reduced schedules at LA's intimate theaters, and the increased cost of producing at those venues (thanks to everything from losing the 99-seat agreement to AB5), LA's vibrant and abundant intimate theater scene feels a little more sparse.

Now the prospect of a low barrier-to-entry, come-one-come-all format, and the consolidation of time and geography feels like a breath of fresh air. Mind you, this isn't so much that the Hollywood Fringe has succeeded, it's more that the rest of LA's theater has constricted making the Fringe more vital. 

All the challenges that existed with the Fringe Festival then still exist now. But LA now needs a Fringe to take up what 99-seat theater has lost.

So be brave, do your best with the fringe schedule, pick a couple of nights between June 13th and 30th, and take a chance on shows that might be magical experiences or glorious failures, the future of LA's intimate theater might depend on it.