Playwright: Kirsten Childs
At: Apple Tree Theatre,
595 Elm Place, Highland Park
Phone: (847) 432-4335; $33-$38
Runs through: May 4
Usually, certain conventions serve as a basic benchmark for genre entertainment: if it's a comedy, you should laugh; if it's horror, you should be scared; and if it's a musical, a song or two should stick in your head. Whether it's pleasant or irritating, one of the tunes, at the very least, should leave you humming or play on endless mental loop until you want to banish it by screaming or consuming controlled substances.
Whatever. The Bubbly Black Girl, at Highland Park's Apple Tree Theatre, fails to leave us with anything hummable, although it does offer a few laughs. But with a 90-minute musical that boasts 27 musical numbers, it's quite sad that I can remember none of them a mere 12 hours or so after the curtain—so to speak—rang down. And I didn't even have a cocktail before or after the show.
The Bubbly Black Girl is about Viveca (Harriet Nzinga Plumpp, lackluster of voice, movement, and stage presence), who grows up in an oddly atmosphere-free Los Angeles of the '60s and '70s wanting to be white and a dancer. We follow Viveca (or Bubbly, as she likes to be called, because she's so 'bubbly,' see?) as she struggles through childhood and adolescent relationships with family, friends, and the pursuit of her own self-actualization. From racial tensions, to sexual tensions, to the traumas of trying to make it as a performer in the Big Apple, Viveca experiences it all, coming at last to the predictable (and brought home to us in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS) realization that she is most comfortable in her own African American skin.
Directed without a song in his heart by Mark E. Lococo, and choreographed gracelessly by Marla Lampert, one wonders why Apple Tree, who usually does work of much higher caliber, chose to stage this amateur musical. At its best, it rises to mediocrity. At its worst, its leaden, clueless, and clichéd (one song bemoans 'Drowning in the Secretarial Pool'). Finally, the play itself degenerates into an unfocused ending that loses all sense of credibility and narrative sense (Viveca auditions for a Bob Fosse stand-in doing a monologue in a high-pitched Foghorn Leghorn voice; a Tina Turner look-alike appears; Viveca has her first orgasm apropos of nothing that has gone before).
The production has this to recommend it: a winning, strong-voiced, and charming performance by Angela Grovey (honey, don't ever let them put a Tina fright wig on you again!), a lovely, understated set by Tim Morrison, and a good idea (the acceptance of oneself as a talented and proud member of a minority) that gets completely lost in an unwieldy execution. This is a 90-minute musical that's about 75 minutes too long.