Review: An Exuberant Gospel at Colonus, Outdoors on Little Island

A preacher (the commanding Stephanie Berry) stands on an outdoor platform, the winds of the Hudson River billowing behind her, a barge sailing past a pinkening sunset. She delivers her sermon — the tale of Oedipus’ final wanderings towards salvation and forgiveness years after he blinded himself in horror at his own misdeeds — to a congregation of gospel choristers who join in the storytelling, joining their voices in warm, ecstatic song as darkness falls around them.

The Gospel at Colonus, the storied musical adaptation of Sophocles’ play of the same title by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, enjoyed a brief 2018 revival at the Delacorte Theater. But it’s hard to imagine a sweeter setting than the open-air Amph on Little Island for an act of collective ritual like this one. Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, whose concurrent staging of Prince Faggot at Playwrights Horizons communicates communal warmth with similar persuasiveness, seats his large ensemble in the front row of the audience, surrounding a circle of musicians (including Butch Heyward, the show’s original inimitable organist).

In following up on the incestuous tempestuousness of Oedipus Rex, Sophocles turned down the dramatic temperature with his sequel, Oedipus at Colonus. And the plot, as closely adapted by Breuer who preserved much of the original play in translation, is slow-moving. Oedipus earns his redemptive ending through reflection and rhetoric rather than action.

That mode of storytelling — transformation through collective consideration — lends itself well to the show’s liturgical structure. But Breuer and composer Telson, in fidelity to the show’s central conceit of treating Sophocles as biblical text, sometimes push a little too hard to mold the ancient Greek original into the shape of their sermon. The moralizing and the story’s stakes — not quite polytheistic, not quite Pentecostal — remain approximate and distant in contrast to the momentous music and to the deep wells of feeling in each voice that break like bracing waves with each new anthem.

The Gospel at Colonus endures most meaningfully, then, as a showcase for the diversity of vocal styles and textures within the gospel genre. From the operatic expanse of Davóne Tines’ tympanic baritone to the tender keening of Frank Senior’s majestic croon, the willowy vibrato of the R&B artist serpentwithfeet, the melisma-enflamed virtuosity of gospel mainstay Kim Burrell, and the aching straight-toned purity in Ayana George Jackson and Samantha Howard’s duet as Oedipus’ daughters, Telson’s music acts as a flexible loom for a tapestry of varied vocal artistry to emerge.

In the original productions, Oedipus was sung by a quintet of performers — Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama — and those arrangements have been revisited to be shared by Senior and Tines. Though Tines is best known for his low register, he flourishes in falsetto here. “I wish the Lord would hide me in a cloud,” Tines sings, riffing on the final word, leaping into a falsetto run, and then suddenly vanishing his sound in the middle of the phrase, flitting into abrupt silence with a vocal text-painting that animates Oedipus’ longing. It’s this sense of careful attention to the storytelling capacity of each artist’s instrument throughout the score, sculpted by co-music directors Dionne McClain-Freeney and James Hall, that keeps The Gospel at Colonus alive even when the libretto itself begins to grow redundant.

That sense of specificity even extends to the large choral ensemble. Dressed in matching light purple but wearing their own shoes (Dr. Kevin Bond’s haughty Creon marches down the aisle in crocs), each singer — including the adorable 4-year-old “Pastor Charles” going to town on his tambourine — projects individual personality within a congregational whole.

Though Garth MacAleavey’s sound design must contend with the sounds of the Hudson and the wind (the brass and saxes, positioned on platforms above the action, are often drowned out in the mix), lighting designer Stacey Derosier matches the musical warmth with colors that both caress and jubilate. Her spotlights closest to the water even seem to mirror the lights flashing across the Hudson, theater technology seamlessly integrated into the quasi-natural landscape.

And even if God’s admonition to Oedipus at his death — “You delay too long” — also applies to the writers’ reluctance to wrap things up, instead offering three rousing would-be finales in a row, the embracing vocal peaks of The Gospel at Colonus are what linger longest. “A memory without pain,” Antigone (Howard) wishes for her tormented father, and The Gospel at Colonus, in the afterglow of its exuberant celebration of soulful storytelling, more than delivers.