Review: A Wonderful World Asks, "What If Six Was About Louis Armstrong's Wives?"

A decade ago, the late theater critic Terry Teachout brought Louis Armstrong to the theatrical stage in the one-man play Satchmo at the Waldorf. Taking place a few months before Armstrong’s death, the bittersweet script (loosely inspired by Teachout’s biography Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong) finds the jazz legend contending with his legacy as a performer beloved by white audiences for hits like “When You’re Smiling” and “Hello, Dolly!” and scorned by the next generation of Black musicians like Miles Davis, who viewed Armstrong as a pandering Uncle Tom.

I thought of Satchmo at the Waldorf a lot during Aurin Squire’s A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical at Studio 54. Mostly, I wished that Teachout’s play, which is more emotional, nuanced, and satisfying, had been granted the bright lights of Broadway, not a potato sack like this.

The focus, mostly, is on Armstrong’s tempestuous marriages to his four wives and how each spouse represents a different chapter in his career development. In New Orleans, where he was raised, Louis (James Monroe Iglehart) marries prostitute Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), eventually leaving her to seek her fortune in Chicago. There, working with King Joe Oliver (Gavin Gregory) and his band, he hooks up with pianist and composer Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who becomes his manager and eventual wife.

That relationship peters out at the end of Act 1, when Louis heads to Hollywood with longtime fan Alpha Smith (Kim Exum). Life finally takes him to New York, where he weds Cotton Club dancer Lucille Wilson (Darlesia Cearcy) and denounces President Eisenhower for not taking a stronger stance on the civil rights movement.

In a manner of speaking, A Wonderful World is a spiritual successor to Six, the megahit pop musical where the divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived spouses of Henry VIII reclaim their places in history. It’s an unexpected entry point that has the potential to be more incendiary than the usual bio-musical hagiography — Armstrong cheated on them all and even fathered a child in an affair in the 1950s. But there’s one crucial problem: The women are so barely drawn that we get no sense of who they are or why we should care about them.

Figgins’s sole motivator is jealousy as the switchblade-toting Daisy, while Cearcy gets to be headstrong and forthright as Lucille, Armstrong’s longest-serving wife (they were married from 1942 through his death in 1971). Squire doesn’t even bother to give any kind of emotional descriptor for Exum to play; Alpha just has a shapely bottom. They do the best they can, and their sterling vocals end up saving the day.

Lil is the most developed character, and Harney-Fleming’s genuinely absorbing performance benefits from all the information that’s available about her. As a pioneering Black female bandleader in the pre-civil rights era and a composer of songs that became eventual pop hits for the likes of Ray Charles and Ringo Starr, Lil Hardin deserves to be the subject of her own show, and I bet it would be more interesting than this. Considering how Wonderful World‘s whole focus is on the deterioration of these relationships, it’s impossible to understand why these actors are given so little to do.

Iglehart is a consummate showman with a megawatt smile, and his voice sounds just gravelly enough to avoid coming off as parody. He’s very good, but much like the script, he shies away from the dark edges that might make Armstrong unlikable, and therefore, believably human. Why does Louis Armstrong fade into the background of “The Louis Armstrong Musical”?

Add to this, the show itself is sloppy in a way that you don’t often see on Broadway. The dancers, though proficient, don’t vibe with Rickey Tripp’s repetitive choreography. The compact set doesn’t leave much room for them to come and go, and the projections have a whiff of AI about them (both are created by Adam Koch and Steven Royal). Cory Pattak’s lighting is gloomy, which means that Toni-Leslie James’s sepia-toned costumes don’t pop like they should. On the other hand, Kai Harada’s sound design is very impressive, allowing us to hear the band in all its glory, playing terrific orchestrations by Branford Marsalis and Daryl Waters.

There’s really only one point where A Wonderful World truly lives up to its name. It’s at the start of Act 2, when Louis gets a visit from Lincoln Perry (DeWitt Fleming Jr.), the performer better known for his vaudeville character Stepin Fetchit. Together, Iglehart and Fleming stop the show cold in a tap number within “When You’re Smiling.” You can feel the music and its legacy coming to life with palpable excitement, and it’s undeniably thrilling in a way that the rest of the show is not.

Iglehart must take at least part of the blame for the shapelessness of A Wonderful World; aside from starring (he shares the role with James T. Lane), he’s also billed as a co-director with Christina Sajous. The fully credited director is Christopher Renshaw, who conceived the production with late Miami gay nightclub entrepreneur and “walking cocktail party” Andrew Delaplaine. I don’t know what the division of labor was, but it’s obvious that there were too many cooks in the kitchen pulling the show into too many different directions. Jeepers creepers, indeed.