O.T. Sam Cooke

[Journeyman2122]

I went to a show based on the life of Sam Cooke here is a review of the show based on the life of Sam Cooke. it was wonderful!!

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'Sam Cooke' re-creates sounds of 'Mr. Soul' in première
By LOIS POTTER, Special to The News Journal

Lawrence Stallings performs as "Mr. Soul," Sam Cooke.
Delaware Theatre Company

Lawrence Stallings performs as “Mr. Soul,” Sam Cooke.
Delaware Theatre Company

WILMINGTON -- In writing and directing "Sam Cooke: Forever Mr. Soul," Kevin Ramsey offers Wilmington a celebration of the life and work of one of the early inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame Web site calls Cooke a "versatile singer who never really settled on a style," and settling on a style is a problem for anyone who wants to do justice to Cooke's short life. He is part of the history of American music in the 1950s and early '60s, and his movement from gospel singing to pop and R&B parallels black America's transition from resigned hope for justice in the hereafter to the demand for justice now. Cooke was the first African-American to refuse to play to segregated houses, a friend of Muhammad Ali, and, at the end of his life, a crossover performer who wrote a stunning contribution -- "A Change Is Going to Come" -- to the developing civil rights movement. There is almost too much material here, and Cooke's violent death in 1964, in circumstances that are still controversial, is yet another potential distraction.

Ramsey’s biggest restriction, however, is not Cooke’s life but access to his work. Perhaps the villain of this story should be Allen Klein, who now owns and jealously guards the whole Cooke repertoire (many of his recordings were released only in the 1980s), thus preventing anyone else from singing it.
This messy situation explains both why Cooke’s great songs aren’t as well-known as they should be and why Ramsey’s play, which seeks to re-establish Cooke’s reputation, can’t include music by Cooke. Instead it consists almost entirely of traditional gospel music and popular songs, like “Tennessee Waltz,” originally created by others. Fortunately, these are good songs, too, and they are well-performed.

Lawrence Stallings, who plays Cooke, has a fine voice and charming presence, and moves effortlessly from “turning a church over” (sending the congregation into hysterics) during his gospel period to showing, with “Little Red Rooster,” that he can gyrate like Elvis the Pelvis. He has no trouble wooing the audience to clap, sing and even stand up and dance, but he is even better when mocking his own rendition of “Mona Lisa.”

Yet, when Stallings re-creates Cooke’s successful crossover” appearance at New York’s Copacabana Club, the play doesn’t question whether this success might also have been a sellout. Stallings performs some easily likeable songs, but not Bob Dylan’s protest song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which Cooke insisted on singing at the end of his show. At this point, what Ramsey calls a play with music seems content simply to rely on its music.

Matthew Myhrum’s brilliant set design makes it possible to move, via projections, between the churches of Cooke’s gospel-singing youth and the nightclubs and recording studios of his R&B career, but Ramsey’s production leaves us in no doubt where he thinks his hero belonged.

Cooke first appears through a crack in the set wall, with a blue sky behind him, singing, “How far am I from Canaan?” At the end, the wide blue sky reappears, this time to the strains of “This little light of mine,” suggesting that the gospel faith represents the “real” Cooke. We never hear the majestic “A Change Is Going to Come,” where the singer declares that we know nothing about what’s beyond the sky. Though this is essentially a one-man show, Kevin Ramsey puts Cooke in dialogue with an onstage radio, whose multiple voices are all played splendidly by broadcaster C.S. Treadway. At one point, Cooke even tries to turn the radio off, but it will not be silenced.

The play’s best and most dramatic moments are those in which the radio takes on the voices of characters from Cooke’s life, especially his preacher father, to challenge his version of events. Ramsey should use more of these voices. Giving some of the documentary material to the radio would save Stallings from wasting his talents on clunky explanatory transition lines that sound like bad voice-overs on the Biography channel.

It would also allow more criticism of a man for whom Ramsey feels perhaps too much admiration (Cooke’s vices are so lightly touched on as to be almost nonexistent) and avoid the impossible situation in which Cooke, the only person who could know the truth about his death, tells us only what is already on record.

In 1957 Cooke appeared, live, at the end of the Ed Sullivan TV show, but audiences couldn’t hear his song “You Send Me” because the show had run out of time. After Sullivan received an unprecedented number of protests from frustrated audiences, the singer returned to the show in December 1958. Ironically, although Ramsey dramatizes this episode, he can’t let us hear Cooke’s famous song.

So those who want to know what Sam Cooke was like as a lyricist and composer will have to buy the CDs on sale in the lobby. There, they will hear charming, sophisticated lyrics and a smooth, beautiful tenor voice that soars like a rocket, bursting into a shower of multicolored notes.

In interviews before the show opened, Kevin Ramsey said that the Delaware Theatre Company needed to actively invite black Wilmingtonians to its party. In fact, this theater has presented a number of memorable shows about great African-Americans. Two of the best were Marion J. Caffey’s “Cookin’ at the Cookery” (2000-01 season) and Tazewell Thompson’s “Constant Star” (2003-04).
Neither of these, however, was a world première, graced with the presence of (and some witty remarks from) Mayor James Baker. Opening night felt like quite an event, and the appearance of the author-director, who pointed out the presence in the audience of two of Sam Cooke’s family members, increased the level of excitement.

Even if – to quote one of many songs that we didn’t hear – you “don’t know much about history,” you can recognize it when you see it being made.
Lois Potter is a freelance writer and theater critic and the Ned B. Allen Professor of English at the University of Delaware.

[Perry86fan]

Thank you, for telling us about the show.I would love to see it.