“God gave me the voice that folks need to hear,” Paul Robeson, the nice African American singer, actor and activist, instructed the Black newspaper “The New York Age” in a 1949 interview.
Aware of his powers and obliged by his affect, Robeson inserted himself into an extremely fraught second in American historical past. His highly effective advocacy for the rights of Black and working-class Americans made him a hero, however his political leanings put him at odds with the prevailing anti-Communist forces in Congress, which finally impeded his profession. Robeson’s fame was international, nevertheless, and he had loads of alternatives overseas — till his U.S. passport was revoked as a result of he wouldn’t disavow membership within the Communist Party in writing. He landed earlier than the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1956, and though he was unafraid of being a lightning rod, he was wearied by it, too.
Today, the legacy of Robeson’s divine bass-baritone voice and its oratorial capaciousness has outlasted the political tarring and feathering. There is not any up to date analogue for Robeson, an artist in a classical medium who grew to become a family identify and leveraged his fame to drive a public dialog round peace and justice. (Yo-Yo Ma, the beloved cellist who created the multicultural Silk Road Project, arguably comes closest, however with out the controversy.)
Davóne Tines, a bass-baritone himself, pays tribute to that legacy in “Robeson,” a brand new one-man present on the Amph on Little Island that weaves collectively snippets of Robeson’s phrases with songs related to him. On Friday evening, the easy enchantment of a popular-song recital collided with indirect, fractured references to Robeson’s life, cracking open a fictionalized glimpse into the emotional turmoil of a person who was seen as an impenetrable “titan,” as Tines put it. It was a vigorously performed, at times irritating present, carried aloft by Tines’s fiery assurance.
Initially, the present’s construction appeared clear sufficient. Tines’s renditions of songs just like the labor anthem “Joe Hill,” which he delivered with assured smoothness, had been interspersed with Robeson’s phrases from newspaper editorials, tv interviews and onstage remarks. Dressed in a Carnegie Hall-ready tuxedo, Tines started with an admirable, if a bit woolly, vocal impersonation of the era-defining singer, emphasizing a deep effectively of sound.
But for an artist like Tines, with a collaborator just like the director Zack Winokur, with whom he conceived the piece, straightforwardness is a feint. The two artists, abetted by the designers Adam Charlap Hyman (units) and Mary Ellen Stebbins (lighting) and the versatile instrumentalists John Bitoy and Khari Lucas, exploded their light re-enactment to discover the inside wrestle of a person identified for equanimity. A deftly executed staging of Robeson’s reported suicide try in a Moscow lodge room, set to a disturbing a cappella model of “Some Enchanted Evening,” plunged the viewers and performers into the present’s paroxysmal coronary heart.
Belittling voices plagued Tines’s Robeson: The congressional panel at his HUAC listening to (“Did you make a bit speech?”) and Jackie Robinson’s restrained but slicing criticism (“If he desires to sound foolish,” stated the Hall of Famer, “that’s his enterprise and never mine”). A multipartite model of the non secular “Scandalize My Name” offered the tour-de-force reply, passing by means of disco and wah-wah funk and culminating in an exhilarating breakdown with new traces added by Tines (“Cuz you gon’ mess up and also you gon’ discover out”). As he did in “The Black Clown,” Tines used style as a dramaturgical device, stitching Robeson right into a Black musical lineage, during which artwork generally is a medium to specific oneself joyfully and irrevocably beneath duress.
When he dropped the Robeson impersonation and started utilizing the lighter colours and textures of his pure singing voice, Tines was free to swing and soar. A daring falsetto pierced a Bach chorale, and the finale, which discovered Tines climbing a scale with rising depth in “This Little Light of Mine,” introduced the viewers to its toes.
Clocking in round an hour, the present nonetheless introduced challenges for Tines’s emotionally invested and tightly managed fashion. He was extra snug in clap-and-snap gospel than intricate, R&B-style runs. The lowest notes had been ever so barely out of attain, and the emphasis on timbral breadth generally turned his singing gummy (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”), exaggerated or approximate.
As a coda, Tines sang “Old Man River,” a Robeson signature of problematic provenance. “That’s the outdated man that I don’t need to be,” he intoned with a tweak to the lyric, stripping the music of its hypnotic lilt in a driving interpretation that traded tokenization for reclamation.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com