DGA Press and Awards - Bubbly Black Girl NYT 2000

Wearing Perkiness That's Cut on a Bias
By Ben Brantley

Originally printed in The New York Times, June 21, 2000

Like me, love me, choose me: the urge to ingratiate is paramount in ''The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin,'' the sharp and tasty new musical that opened last night at Playwrights Horizons.

Hard-sell effervescence, the stock in trade of those who would be musical comedy stars, abounds in this charming, self-aware memoir of a show by Kristen Childs, a onetime dancer turned playwright and composer. All that sparkle and fizz has a sting for the work's title character, an aspiring dancer who grows up black with white dreams in sunny, middle-class Los Angeles. The production may go down like soda pop, but its bubbles are barbed.

The girl of the title is Viveca (played with savvy double-edged radiance by LaChanze), who treats life as an open audition in which you must never be caught with your smile down. She's delightful, she's delicious, she's disgusting, as the show ingeniously turns professional perkiness, the lifeblood of the American musical, into a funny, poignant comment on ethnic self-denial.

''Bubbly Black Girl,'' which has been incubating for five years while garnering a clutch of awards and development grants, began as a more purely autobiographical performance piece. In its current incarnation it brings to mind an extended if more distanced version of one of the emotionally annotated resumes delivered by the auditioners of ''A Chorus Line.''

Under the swift, focused direction of Wilfredo Medina, with choreography by A. C. Ciulla, ''Bubbly'' hardly emerges as a tear-stained cri de coeur. As it follows its heroine through the dismantling of a sheltered life, the show deliberately and bravely traffics in two dimensions, in cliches and cultural stereotypes.

In so doing, it reminds us of the degree to which most children grow up accepting and measuring themselves by such stereotypes, in ways that both comfort and confine. ''Bubbly'' is about exchanging those feelings for fear and freedom; in other words, it's about growing up.

The process, of course, is complicated if you're presented with conflicting paradigms. Little Viveca reads heroic tales of Harriet Tubman while confiding her innermost secrets to a blond, blue-eyed doll named Chitty Chatty. Her mother (Debra M. Walton) disapproves of this white alter ego; on the other hand, it's her mother who teaches Viveca to straighten her hair.

The girl's response to these mixed signals -- and the nastier variations that emerge in her adolescence -- is to cover confusion with the broad, stonewall smile that her father always told her was her best defense. Small wonder that she winds up in show business.

Throughout the evening's brisk musical vignettes the surface tone is blithe, even cartoonish. Yet there is also a strong subterranean pull of anxiety. Ms. Childs emerges here as a fresh and disarming composer, able to weave simple, hummable tunes that consistently subvert themselves. Rhythmic bounciness is underlaid with apprehension, and melodies shift slowly from Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style effulgence into a sobering, minor-key somberness.

A hymn sung by Viveca's father (Robert Jason Jackson), meant to reassure her after she learns about the now legendary bombing of the black church in Birmingham, Ala., turns unexpectedly into a haunting elegy for the four girls killed. Viveca's beloved talking doll comes to life as not one but two performers (Angel Desai and Felicia Finley), who sing in uneasy, robotic counterpoint. (The doll also inspires the evening's funniest line: ''Chitty Chatty is passing!'')

Not every number fits in effortlessly. But most of the ensemble pieces, written in musical idioms ranging from doo-wop to Kander and Ebb sultriness, adroitly show Viveca trying to find her own rhythms in the world beyond her family sanctuary. A number devoted to the varied personalities of the children attending Viveca's dance class is delightful, a peevish answer to the ballet rhapsody of ''A Chorus Line.''

Equally appealing are the stoned-into-languor hippie song (titled with acerbic bluntness ''War Is Not Good'') in which the teenage Viveca learns to dance ''off the beat,'' though it goes against her better instincts, and a party sequence in which she awkwardly emulates the teasing arrogance of her more sexually confident black girlfriends. The matching humor and clean-lined flair of the dances are a far and unexpected cry from Mr. Ciulla's work on the leaden ''Footloose.''

The set designer David Gallo again shows his peerless gifts for shorthand visual wit, most notably in a scene in which he gives literal-minded life to the words ''secretarial pool.'' And Michael Lincoln's lighting and David C. Woolard's costumes enhance the sense of a cheery comic-strip world that is destined to implode.

The supporting cast members carry out the same sensibility in a well-honed assortment of roles. They're all winners, though I was particularly taken with Darius de Haas (so affecting in ''Running Man''), who gives the show its anchor of emotional reality; Jerry Dixon, as a sexually liberating seducer (for whom Ms. Childs has written a great low-key pick-up song); and Natalie Venetia Belcon, who has a wonderful bit as a young woman who is part Angela Davis, part giddy Valley Girl.

Then there is the magnetic LaChanze (of ''Once on This Island''), who manages to sustain Viveca's hard-smiling peppiness without turning tedious. There's always a heartbreaking flicker of doubt in her eager-to-please eyes, and like Ms. Childs's music, she gently suggests the shadows in sunniness. The paralyzed expression on her face when, in a dance audition, she is asked to ''be yourself'' is priceless. So is her interpretation of the anthem of self-discovery that follows, which in other hands might have seemed too pat.

When the adult Viveca moves to New York (where the psychically damaged go, the show tells us, ''to make their dreams come true''), it makes sense that she winds up in the world of musical-comedy gypsies who must change their personalities to suit the varied whims of directors and choreographers.

Viveca's audition for Director Bob (Jonathan Dokuchitz), a character clearly modeled on Bob Fosse, is the occasion for the show's most savory bit of pastiche, a sequence in which undulating, swivel-hipped dancers coo, ''Don't neglect me, please inspect me, ooh, direct me, Director Bob.'' In recent seasons the Fosse style has been endlessly quoted and imitated in new musicals. Yet somehow this burlesque vignette in ''Bubbly'' feels newly minted.

It's a sendup all right, but there's no contempt in it. Instead the sequence has the sense of something recollected with affectionate irony. Ms. Childs has clearly chosen to look back not in anger but with an amused and forgiving clearsightedness. It's a warming point of view that makes this captivating new musical much more than the satiric sketchbook it might have been.

THE BUBBLY BLACK GIRL SHEDS HER CHAMELEON SKIN

Book, music and lyrics by Kirsten Childs; directed by Wilfredo Medina; choreographed by A. C. Ciulla; sets by David Gallo; costumes by David C. Woolard; lighting by Michael Lincoln; sound by Jon Weston; musical director, Fred Carl; orchestrations by Joe Baker; associate producer, Ira Weitzman; associate producer (Wind Dancer Theater), Pamela Perrell McCarthy; dirctor of development, Jill Garland; production manager, Christopher Boll; production stage manager, Alexis Shorter. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director, in association with Wind Dancer Theater. At 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton.

WITH: LaChanze (Viveca), Cheryl Alexander (Miss Pain, Harriet Tubman, Secretary, Talullah and Granny), Natalie Venetia Belcon (Emily, Nilda and Sandra), Duane Boutte (Larry and Keith), Darius de Haas (Gregory), Angel Desai (Chitty Chatty Pal 1, Secretary, Ballet Teacher and Sophia), Jerry Dixon (Jazz Teacher, Dance Captain and Lucas), Jonathan Dokuchitz (Prince, Cosmic, Policeman and Director Bob), Felicia Finley (Chitty Chatty Pal 2, Secretary, Modern Teacher and Scarlett), Robert Jason Jackson (Daddy and Policeman) and Debra M. Walton (Mommy, Yolanda and Delilah).