Joan Marcus Photo
There’s an odd discordance in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy, running now at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 23 in a sumptuous production directed by Christopher D. Betts, an MFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and featuring Israel Erron Ford, a recent graduate of the former Yale School of Drama.
On the one hand, this is McCraney’s Broadway show — productions have been mounted in London, New York, and Los Angeles — and it aims to be a crowd pleaser. With wonderfully resonant a cappella numbers and stomping dance routines from a stellar ensemble, it succeeds. On the other hand, the play wants to be a serious critique of homophobia and the toxic masculinist vibe prevalent in our culture generally, and that goal doesn’t always jell with the jukebox musical the play at times resembles.
On Broadway, a gay Black male hero can be called transgressive, which might go a long way to support the critique McCraney has styled. At the Yale Rep, however, that’s rather less the case. We’re so immediately on the side of Pharus (Ford) that there’s no gradual earning of sympathy necessary. From the opening moment when Pharus gets taunted with slurs by Bobby (Anthony Holiday), the bullying nephew of the headmaster, while singing before the entire school, we resent not only the remarks but the interruption itself — shut up and let Pharus sing! In the following scene, we see how the headmaster — well-meaning and high-strung in Allen Gilmore’s rendering — tries to get Pharus to tone down his flamboyance while trying not to align himself with the homophobia of his nephew. And we respect Pharus for not snitching on his antagonist. Some showdown between the two is in the cards, but the way the story plays out is not only disappointing, but even a bit incoherent.
The all-Black troupe of students at the Charles R. Drew Preparatory School for Boys, where the play is set, are well-dressed and gentlemanly (mostly), and we may be primed to expect a sendup of the kinds of schools that feed into a place like Yale, or an exploration of how complex the interrelations in such elite preserves may be. Instead we get earnest versions of a cliched group of kids: the well-meaning jock, the class clown, the insecure bully, the scholarship student wrestling with his identity, and the sensitive and gifted hero who is trying to downplay his swish while hungering for a time and place that would let him be fully out.
The production’s problematic tonal shifts may well come from trying to be an inspiring musical — and the show is that — while not having much to work with in terms of characters. The ensemble’s song and dance numbers (uncredited in the playbill but including “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” and “What Wondrous Love is This”) are well worth the price of admission, with music direction and vocal arrangements by Allen René Louis and choreography by Amy Hall Garner. So too is the gorgeous set of faux stained glass panels and rich wood paneling by Anna Grigo. And, to be fair, the formulaic nature of the characters might be a deliberate choice in a bid for popular appeal. There’s even the possibility of a To Sir With Love flip of Black kids learning to respect a white teacher, daffy if diligent Mr. Pendleton (Walton Wilton), rather than tough white kids going all soft over Sidney Poitier. To expect something more original may be misguided.
Much rides on the character of Pharus, who is so clearly the star of the show — both literally and in the school’s assembly of undeveloped roles — that it’s reasonable to expect something more from him than heroic abstinence. As he says forthrightly, he’s accused of being what he’s not doing. Israel Erron Ford is well-cast in his winning manner and stirring singing voice, and yet the role requires a cool arrogance that Ford finds only fleetingly. Ford is at his best in the scenes where Pharus gets to be more than mere mannerism and attitude, as when he waxes eloquent about his feeling for spirituals. He argues that they were necessary as a means to survive slavery, but to sing them primarily in that light is to commemorate slavery rather than finding the songs’ meaning in our own times. At their best, the musical productions can be said to live up to Pharus’s vision, and that’s the real heart and soul of Choir Boy.
Plotwise, the gem is in the evolving relationship between Pharus and his roommate AJ (Malik James), a compassionate athlete who befriends Pharus despite some embarrassing aspects in their relations. Their friendship is the story that matters, whereas the plot about Bobby — played with a kind of bashful surliness by Holiday — and the eventual revelations of Pharus’s bad judgment are almost comical in their pro forma setups. And the fun in the get-down between Bobby and his sidekick Junior (Jarrett Anthony Bennett) is another example of how the joy of the musical performances undermines at times the plot’s emotional cues.
It can be hard to say if Betts is missing the mark or hitting a mark that doesn’t always work. And that uncertainty could be the means to a stronger grasp of what works best in McCraney’s “Boyz II Men” story. If the plot isn’t about how the boys come to love and accept Pharus, then we have to come to accept how, for all his gifts, talents, and attitude, Pharus fails to forgo immediate pleasure for the sake of his higher calling.
