Blues in the Night

Freda Payne, Maurice Hines, Paulette Ivory, and Carol Woods star in Blues in the Night, conceived and directed by Sheldon Epps, and featuring choreography by Kenneth Lee Roberson.

Blues in the Night takes place in the late 1930’s in a cheap Chicago hotel located at the deserted corner of Wilson and Broadway where three women and a saloon singer let the music that gets them through their lonely nights wash over a deserving audience before sending them back into their own nights.

Sheldon Epps’ blues-drenched and jazz-painted elegy to the vulnerable solitude of these four struggling, hard-drinking, law abiding folks just trying to make it through another long, hot, humid Chicago night uses the great songs of the 1920’s and 1930’s to explore their lives and the history of their music.

Featuring music and lyrics written by Andy Razaf, Benny Goodman, Bernard Hanighen, Bessie Smith, Billy Strayhorn, Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, E. A. Swan, Edgar Sampson, George W. Thomas, Gordon Jenkins, Grand Clarke, H. Grey, Harold Arlen, Harry Akst, Harry Revel, Ida Cox, Jimmy Cox, Jimmy Davis, Jimmy Sherman, John LaTouche, Johnny Mercer, Leola Wilson, Mack David, Mack Gordon, Roger “Ram” Ramirez, Ted Fetter, Ted Koehler, Vernon Duke, Wesley Wilson, and Willard Robinson.