Spring, 1957. Somewhere in Manhattan. Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim watch with equal parts excitement and fear, as West Side Story is presented at a backer’s audition. It fails to garner support, but they continue their work and in September of that year the show has a successful opening, going on to become a smash hit. (Oddly it lost the Tony for Best Musical to The Music Man). Who were the people in that first audience? Clearly they had no idea that they were watching the birth of a classic.
Last night Ransom and I shared their experience. At a rehearsal studio on 26th Street we attended a staged reading of Andrew Gerle’s musical Gloryana. A cast of ten sang their hearts out with backup from a band of six. There were perhaps 75 people in attendance.
Will Gloryana follow West Side Story’s path, or will it become another project that fails to find a following? I don’t know, but if it succeeds, Ransom and I will be pleased to say, "We were there," for we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Gloryana is a musical about race, about opportunity and about choices. It features a love story between a Confederate Civil War soldier and a Union nurse, as well as a contemporary tale of a wise-ass kid mouthing off with fatal consequences. It includes perhaps the most in-your-face anthem I’ve ever heard in a musical, “Why Ain’t We Angry,” powerfully sung by the amazing Angela Grovey. Megan Lewis is equally good as the clever redneck waitress Jewel. Gilbert L. Bailey II dances and sings Jamal with conviction; F. Michael Haynie convincingly portrays the crazed neo-Confederate Mason, while John-Michael Lyles finds the right balance between macho and child as a young man growing away from his mother and finding Walt Whitman while trying to avoid the lure and tragedy of the ‘hood.
If all this sounds like too much, well, it is. The show needs to be tightened and a character or two might have to be jettisoned. But musically it is brilliant, as composer Gerle finds just the right voice for each of his characters -- and each of those characters was convincingly played by a way-talented group of actors, all Equity members. There are moments of hilarity and others of transfixing intensity, just as there must be in any great musical.
Better shows than this have likely been written and lost. Gloryana deserves better and I wish all involved great success.
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