Blues For An Alabama Sky
Tickets and Information
SHOW INFORMATION
Opened Nov 1, 2011
Closed Nov 27, 2011
Visit the Blues For An Alabama Sky website:
http://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Blues For An Alabama Sky unfolds in the summer of 1930 in Harlem, NY, just as the harsh realities of the Great Depression have devastated an ebullient decade of the Harlem renaissance. Disease and poverty have overshadowed the creative euphoria that permeated and fueled a surge of African American artists, writers and luminaries. Blues For An Alabama Sky introduces a rich cast of characters, scrambling to survive and make some sense of their overlapping personalities, politics and love lives: Angel is a struggling blues singer and nightclub performer who cannot find a job. Her friend Guy, a costume designer, is also out of work but dreams of being hired to design dresses for the famous African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker. Their neighbor Delia, a social worker, is trying to organize a family planning clinic in Harlem. Their friend Sam, a doctor, works long hours delivering babies at the Harlem Hospital. And Leland, having recently moved to New York from Tuskegee sees in Angel a memory of lost love and a reminder of those "Alabama skies where the stars are so thick it's bright as day."
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Raging unemployment. Homelessness. The fight for reproductive rights. Rampant homophobia and brutal gay-bashing. Pearl Cleage may have written Blues for an Alabama Sky in 1995 and set it in 1930, but its umbrella themes of cultural intolerance and desperate times/desperate measures make her fairly predictable, two-hour dramedy exceedingly relevant for 2011.
Therefore, it's all the more disappointing that the production at The Pasadena Playhouse, with a cast led by Robin Givens and directed by Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps, holds so much promise but doesn't entirely live up to it.
Set in Harlem during the Great Depression, Blues is largely about hopeful dreams in hopeless time[...]