Playwright: Regina Taylor
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: (312) 443-3800; $25-$55
Runs through: April 18
Does Emilio Sosa have a shop? Just as the gowns worn by actresses at the Academy Awards ceremonies are promptly copied for salivating ladies of fashion, so could the Goodman Theatre auction off the costume designer's headgear after the production's run and emerge with funds sufficient to finance their next season.
Adapted by Regina Taylor from Craig Marberry and Michael Cunningham's picture book, this exuberant musical celebrates the world of hats: their construction, their decoration, their acquisition, their care and handling. Hats reflecting religious modesty, hard-won affluence, or family legacies. Hats as tools for flirtation, marital accord (or contention) and memento mori. Hats worn to hide the wearer and hats worn to parade them. Hats that magically change their shape to become TWO hats.
But Crowns is not merely a fashion show. Taylor's text recounts the education of a hip-hop teenager from Brooklyn sent to live with her grandmother in rural South Carolina following the death of her beloved brother in a gang shooting. At first, the defiant youngster clings to her urban identity—symbolized by her late sibling's baseball cap, which she wears in his memory—but gradually she comes to learn the role that this deceptively frivolous accessory plays in her cultural heritage: the mandatory hats-gloves-and-nylons dress code at women's colleges, for example, or the first hat purchased at a formerly whites-only store. Accompanying this chronicle of progress-through-millinery-majesty is the music of the church, at one time the sole occasion for safe display of such luxuries.
The seven-member ensemble featuring Desiré Dubose, Gail Grate, Tina Fabrique, Karan Kendrick, Barbara D. Mills and Bernardine Mitchell, with Chicago's own John Steven Crowley as an assortment of bewildered males, generate jubilation intense enough to make the sun shine at night, assisted by stageside musicians e'Marcus Harper on piano and David Pleasant on Everything Else. And if you don't find yourself caught up in the spirit, by the 30-minute mark, you might just as well hang up your hat for good.