The Black Crook: an Original, Magical and Spectacular Musical Drama by Charles M. Barras (review)

Since its debut over 150 years ago, The Black Crook has played an equivocal role in US theatre history. It was not so much a coherent work as a theatrical portmanteau into which, in 1866, impresario William Wheatley stuffed a fairy melodrama by Charles Barras, a Parisian ballet troupe, a string of popular melodies, and eye-popping scenic effects. The result was an unlikely hit: a mixture of spectacle, sentimentality, sensation, and female legs that featured over a hundred performers, ran up to five hours long, and made a fortune. In its guise as the so-called first American musical The Black Crook was the progenitor of Show Boat, Into the Woods, Hamilton, and many others. As an example of nineteenth-century entertainment—episodic, melodramatic, and joyously incoherent—it can seem painfully dated: a candidate for resurrection rather than revival. At the heart of Joshua William Gelb’s adaptation lay this dialectic between liveliness and mortality.

Like such recent New York productions as George C. Wolfe’s recontextualized Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed and Branden Jenkins-Jacobs’s revisionist An Octoroon, Gelb’s The Black Crook set an iconic work of the past within the context of its own creation. The juxtaposition of memory, melodrama, and backstage machination allowed the production to explore the confluence of historical events that gave birth to The Black Crook: the foment of New York City following the Civil War, the desperation of impecunious writers and managers, the bitter rivalries between second-string acting talents, and the happy and tragic accidents of fate. Gelb invited the audience into the world of the play through the narrating figure of Barras himself (Steven Rattazzi). Small, stammering, and heavily bewigged, he stepped in and out of the action to look back ruefully at his Faustian bargain with Wheatley (Merlin Whitehawk), who offered him a lucrative contract for The Black Crook if he renounced creative agency over the show. The second act featured a second narrator in the person of Joseph Whitton (Christopher Tocco), box-office manager and real-life author of an “inside history” of The Black Crook. Although this addition threatened to create one frame too many, it gave Gelb a chance to showcase both the praise and the anti-theatrical opprobrium heaped on this epoch-making spectacle. Revealing vignettes—a spirited rendition of “You Naughty, Naughty Men”; the sight of gentlemen arriving at 9:30 pm sharp for their nightly viewing of the show’s infamously risqué ballet; Wheatley’s moving recollection of a fire at one of his theatres, which killed nine teenaged dancers—both pleased theatre history aficionados and underlined the complicated admixture of pleasure and pain that lies behind any successful theatrical entertainment.

Randy Blair, Christopher Tocco, Alaina Ferris, Jessie Shelton, Merlin Whitehawk, and Kate Weber in The Black Crook. (Photo: Kelly Stuart.)

The show’s casting was as ingenious as its structure. Its eight performers were double, triple, and even quadruple-cast, their roles in Barras’s fairy drama mirroring their roles in real life. In a series of touching domestic scenes, spectators learned that Barras’s desperation to gain Wheatley’s acceptance for The Black Crook was inseparable from his desperation to save his beloved wife, actress Sallie St. Clair (Alaina Ferris), whose illness demanded costly treatments. Rattazzi, hapless and occasionally risible as Barras, took on a heroic mangenue’s pathos as The Black Crook’s hero, Rodolphe. Frail but valiant as the dying Sallie, Ferris was beleaguered but valiant as The Black Crook’s distressed heroine Amina (and full-on kick-ass as its fairy queen, Stalacta). Whitehawk’s saturnine disdain as the compromised Wheatley exploded into demonic swagger when he took on the role of the melodrama’s eponymous “black crook,” the...