Uptown Players | Dallas, Texas


		Music: Cy Coleman Lyrics: Ira Gasman Book: David Newman,Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman

The Life
Date: Feb 6 -29 , 2004 Directed by - Bruce Coleman Music Direction -Mark Mullino Choreography - Arianna Movassagh Set Design - Andy Redmon Lighting Design - Julie Simmons Costume Design - Bruce Coleman Sound Design - Virgil Justice

Cast : Natalie Wilson King **, M. Denise Lee**, Patrick Amos**, Cedric Neal, Casey Robinson ,Stephanie Young, Courtney Franklin, Shelley Osterberger, Arianna Movassagh, Chimberly Carter, Brandi Andrade, Randy Pearlman, Richard Rollin, J. Mathew Butler, Rick Espaillat, Michael Albee and Chris Robinson

** Member of Actors Equity Association

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Photographs by Mark Oristano

Reviews

Uptown Players live the good ‘Life’ with exceptional, gritty musical

Arnold Wayne Jones - Dallas Voice

The performance of “The Life” begins before most patrons have taken their seats or the first chord of music is played. The Times Square set at the Trinity River Arts Center is already choked with smoke when the doors to the Kim Dawson Theater open, and a female pole dancer slides and gyrates aggressively next to a porn theater marquee bearing movies with names like “Spanking in Tongues.” It’s homo hell.

It’s also emblematic of everything that goes right in this production. For the next two-and-a-half hours, the Uptown Players maintain this illusion of gritty New York street life, circa 1982, with hardly a misstep. “The Life” is as good as any musical — any play for that matter — mounted in Dallas in the past six months.

Queen (Natalie Wilson King) and Fleetwood (Cedric Neal) have been lovers ever since they lived in Savannah. Now that they are in the Big Apple, things have gotten tough. Even though Queen sells herself for rent money and Fleetwood often snorts up his nose, they love each other and believe the future holds white picket fences and PTA bake sales.

Memphis (Patrick Amos) has other plans. He’s the local pimp daddy, and Queen is the only pro not in his stable of girls. When Fleetwood gets distracted by Mary (Stephanie Young), a corn-fed young Midwesterner fresh off the bus, Memphis pounces and woos Queen away.

On the surface, the story sounds trite and familiar — “Dreamgirls” with prostitutes, or “Guys and Dolls” with the F word and STDs. But this is no perky girl-in-the-city musical — think more along the lines of “La Boheme.” Tragedy lurks under every discarded gum wrapper and in the corner of every dank watering hole.

Credit director Bruce Coleman for expertly setting the tone and manipulating it effortless throughout the hills and valleys of his characters’ lives. He escorts us from a sense of futility toward bleak, brutal despair not with jarring, theatrical moments but with subtle yet inevitable shifts.

It helps that he’s working with a solid if under-appreciated book and score from Cy Coleman, Ira Gasman and David Newman. There are 18 actors and almost as many major characters here, each with his or her own personality and an intriguing back-story just waiting to be told. The best songs (“Spent All Night,” “The Oldest Profession,” “He’s No Good,” the melancholy ragtime of “Go Home”) reveal not only the actors’ gifts with music, but the inner lives of the ladies of the evening — especially Queen and her best friend Sonja (Denise Lee). Even the songs that lack a distinct musicality (“Oh Daddy,” “A Piece of the Action”) have the advantage of being expository, advancing the plot substantively.

This is all made possible by an exceptionally gifted cast, led by Natalie King. King’s usual singing style, like Billie Holliday’s, is fraught with full, rounded notes, as if she’s singing a spiritual and every word may mean her salvation. She’s always demonstrated considerable talent, but she has finally mastered the lyric quality required of a musical. This is especially apparent in act one, where her voice is as melodic and happy as her disposition; by the time things starts to sour in act two, when her torch songs becomes arias, swamped with operatic weight, her switch in style packs greater resonance.

I’ve grown weary of praising Denise Lee, who is simply unmatched in her ability to take any line or lyric, grab it by the horns and wrestle it into submission with her personality. (“I’ve met so many Shriners, I’m up for membership,” she blurts, grabbing one of the best laughs of the evening.) Stephanie Young has been playing bitter, cynical 30-year-olds for the past year, so who knew she could let loose so recklessly, or that she had such a strong singing voice?

Amos is such a polite, quiet person in real life and in most of his roles that it takes a few minutes to actually buy him as the heavy. But by the time he sings “Don’t Take Much,” a sinister dirge about corrupting women, the transformation is complete. His chocolaty baritone is as seductive as a soft bed. Amos’ chief competition from the men comes from newcomer Casey Robinson in the central role of Jojo. He has a glowing personality, with the bright, flashing energy of a cat, and offers one of the best-suited voices for a role in memory. Of the principals, only Neal lacks the necessary charisma to command our attention.

Aside from some technical glitches on opening night, 95 percent of this production of “The Life” is Broadway quality. In fact it may be better: the Uptown Players replace dazzle with heart. It’s a tradeoff anyone should gladly accept.

Uptown Players score with unhappy hookers in The Life

Elaine Liner, Dallas Observer

Poignant ugliness pervades The Life, the tuneful musical about prostitutes and pimps. The show is now onstage at the Trinity River Arts Center in an eye-popping regional premiere produced by the Uptown Players.

The year is 1980. The place is pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street. Under the glow of porn theater marquees, tired whores in too-tight hot pants and ripped fishnets struggle to meet their nightly quota. "You got some kind of motor down there?'' says one harried working girl to another. "It's not a motor, honey, it's a meter,'' her friend answers, "and it's always runnin'.''

Such is the pace of life in The Life. Funny, passionate and ultimately tragic, this 150-minute musical moves at a frantic clip as it explores the grungier flipside of the "Hey, Big Spender'' Park Avenue hooker biz depicted in Sweet Charity, whose score also was composed by Cy Coleman (he did Barnum and Will Rogers Follies, too, and The Life is better than both of those). No prozzies find redemption in this one. Queen, Sonja, Frenchie, Chichi and the other streetwalkers who populate The Life are too old, too fleshy or too strung out to work uptown like Charity Hope Valentine did. These gals are as much a part of the rugged landscape of the old Times Square as triple-X peep shows and three-card monte.

It's gritty stuff, made even meaner by the male characters, a lordly pimp named Memphis and a good-looking, coked-up con man named Fleetwood. They rule their women's lives and bodies with balled-up fists and violent threats. Queen and her friends, try as they might, can't escape them or give up the easy money they make in the sex business. The women are further humiliated watching a new girl, Mary from Minnesota, step off a bus at Port Authority and almost immediately transition from prostitution to a better-paying career in porn. Pretty Woman it ain't.

All of the main roles in The Life call for heavy lifting in the singing and acting departments. Director Bruce Coleman couldn't have found stronger leads than Natalie Wilson King as Queen, M. Denise Lee as her weary friend Sonja, Cedric Neal as Fleetwood, Stephanie Young as Mary, Casey Robinson as Jojo (another pimp and the story's opening and closing narrator) and Patrick Amos as Memphis. One after another, these performers deliver moments to remember, particularly King, Lee and Amos, who are so supremely talented somebody somewhere needs to write a show just for them right now. Lee, her voice sounding a little smokier than usual, not only belts several big numbers, including the sad-funny anthem "The Oldest Profession,'' her character gets many of the best lines in the script (by David Newman, Coleman and Ira Gasman). Says Sonja, "Girl, I got eyes in the back o' my ass.''

Starting their third season, Uptown Players producers Jeff Rane and Craig Lynch have their eyes squarely on their audience, the Oak Lawn crowd who crave new musicals and dig edgy, adult material. Uptown has booked three regional premieres this season. After The Life comes Charles Busch's gay-centric comedy Red Scare on Sunset and writer-composer Andrew Lippa's version of The Wild Party. This theater attracts top area performers, and the casts seem to get better with each new show.

The Life features the most complicated technical and artistic work here yet. Andy Redmon's set design takes up half the theater space yet makes easy switches between garbage-strewn street scenes and a couple of interiors. Julie Simmons' lighting design has hundreds of cues, but the changes are never distracting. Costumes by Bruce Coleman and Binnie Tomaro are appropriately trashy, even witty. The modern zoot suits worn by Memphis are both garish and menacing in their sharp details. As always, musical director Scott A. Eckert keeps the five-piece combo tight. His keyboard work is dynamite. Ditto the way Dan Cason blows those woodwinds.

This is a knockout show that carries a hard R-rating. There's profanity, stripping, physical violence and simulated drug use. Hell, they even smoke cigarettes onstage. The Life, unfiltered.

Musical 'The Life' doesn't back down

Perry Stewart -Fort Worth Star-Telegram

In the 1960s, composer Cy Coleman enjoyed a career boost courtesy of a dance hall floozy named Sweet Charity. Three decades later, Coleman returned to the world of Manhattan working girls with The Life.

There are fewer similarities between these two shows than you might think. The first is a sweet fable based on a Federico Fellini movie. The second is a caustic depiction of the struggle endured by prostitutes on 42nd Street in 1980. Many songs in The Life contain R-rated lyrics. In fact, one song title is unprintable.

But Uptown Players of Dallas does not back away from The Life. Its first-rate regional premiere of the 1997 musical is served with warts, tarts and all in the intimate Trinity River Arts Center.

Director Bruce Coleman, musical director Scott Eckert and choreographer Arianna Movassagh kick the action off with Check It Out, which is spirited but less than electrifying. The pace builds quickly, however, and seldom flags.

The book by composer Coleman, David Newman and Ira Gasman focuses on three women. Queen considers herself a "temp" in the life. She'll soon quit and move back to Georgia with her boyfriend, Fleetwood, a dysfunctional Vietnam veteran. Mary is new in town, fresh-faced and naive. (Or is she?) Sonja is a veteran who complains that she is getting too old for The Oldest Profession -- a dynamite number that M. Denise Lee punches across with acting prowess and an impressive vocal range.

Natalie Wilson King is a strong presence as Queen. It certainly isn't the fault of the actress that her character is assigned too many numbers that rehash the same topics. Stephanie Young, as Mary, shares a delightful scene with Randy Pearlman (as a porn producer) on the wickedly funny People Magazine.

Casey Robinson is slyly treacherous, but not without charm as Jojo, the street survivor who knows how to Use What You Got. Patrick Amos, meanwhile, is pure menace as Memphis, the pimp who knows that it Don't Take Much to lure young women into the life. Cedric Neal is a slow starter as Fleetwood, but he comes to life by the time King realizes that He's No Good, a number that ends with a brilliantly subtle visual image. It's a quiet triumph shared with designers Amy Redmon, Binnie Tomaro and Julie Simmons.