Review: Dulé Hill and Daniel J. Watts Are Unforgettable in a Murky Lights Out

Take some well-known songs by a beloved artist like Bobby Darin or Louis Armstrong, plunk them into a standard storyline of flashbacks and dance numbers, and you’ve got yourself the makings of a biomusical.

Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor had the right instinct about Nat King Cole being a good subject for one: His songs are classics, he rubbed elbows with the greats, and he had a trail-blazing TV show whose run was cut short because of timid sponsors and flat-out racism. All the pieces are there to celebrate Cole’s life, generate great performances, and tell a good story.

Lights Out, now running at New York Theatre Workshop, does the first two of those things really well, but rather than a straightforward plot, Domingo and McGregor, who also directs, have stitched together a dreamlike romp through Cole’s subconscious that’s more chaotic than coherent.

Yes, we get to hear his greatest hits, and the dancing is off the chain (Edgar Godineaux choreographs, with Jared Grimes handling the show’s kick-ass tap numbers), but Lights Out is encumbered by jumbled storytelling that takes our attention away from Cole’s life and music as we try to figure out what’s going on.

Things start off plainly enough. It’s December 17, 1957, and The Nat King Cole Show is about to tape its last episode. Cole (a marvelous Dulé Hill) is backstage prepping for his last appearance. With his trademark slicked-back hair (wigs by Nikiya Mathis) and skinny tie (costumes by Katie O’Neill), he’s stewing over the fact that his producer (Christopher Ryan Grant) can’t land a decent sponsor to keep his show on the air. Plus, his makeup assistant (Kathy Fitzgerald) is putting too much white powder on his face. “It’s just … the South, you know?” she says, visibly pained by her job.

Things suddenly take a surreal turn with a flash of light (by Stacey Derosier) and thunderous boom (by Alex Hawthorn and Drew Levy) as we enter Cole’s mind where a puckish Sammy Davis Jr. (uncannily portrayed by Daniel J. Watts) appears as a kind of Christmas ghost to take Cole (and us) on a metaphysical journey (Davis, a dear friend of Cole’s, was very much alive at the time).

In the following fever dream, which makes up most of the show’s 90 minutes, the rest of the cast turn out admirable performances as characters from Cole’s childhood and professional life. We see him as a boy (Mekhi Richardson), and meet his mother, Perlina (Kenita Miller), along with celebs of the day like Eartha Kitt (Krystal Joy Brown), Betty Hutton and Peggy Lee (both played by Ruby Lewis), and Billy Preston (Richardson). Cole’s daughter, Natalie (Brown), makes an appearance as well.

In the swirl of all these apparitions, Cole’s music (arranged and orchestrated by John McDaniel) weaves in and out, sometimes whole songs, sometimes fragments. Hill’s spot-on impression of Cole’s smoky vocals in “Nature Boy” is enough to give you chills, and his duet with Lewis in “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” lets us unwrinkle our foreheads for a moment and smile. Miller’s mighty rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” will make you want to get up out of your seat and applaud. And not enough can be said about Watts’s tireless performance as Davis. “I’m gonna warm you UP!” he tells the audience. And he does.

The highlight of the show is a incredible tap duet with Hill and Watts singing a combo of “Me and My Shadow” and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” (Clint Ramos’s set with screens featuring David Bengali’s video design lets us watch the action as if on black-and-white televisions). The number brings the house down, but it’s not enough to save Lights Out from its confusing structure.

That’s a shame because the show does have a lot to say about the racism of the 1950s (and, by extension, of today), the cowardice of Madison Avenue, and the historic importance of Cole’s show (not until Flip Wilson in 1970 was there another successful TV show with a Black host). Lights Out is admirable for trying to take the biomusical in a new direction rather than hoofing down a familiar path, but in the end, it leaves us in the dark.