The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin review witty, vivacious musical | Theatre
Theatre This article is more than 7 years oldReviewThe Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin review – witty, vivacious musical
This article is more than 7 years oldTheatre Royal Stratford East, London
A black dancer meets police prejudice and industry stereotyping as she bids to make it on Broadway in a lively, inventive story
It has taken 17 years for this musical, with book, music and lyrics by Kirsten Childs, to reach London from off-Broadway. It is more than welcome, since it’s a lively show, has something to say and is excellently directed, with many witty touches, by Josette Bushell-Mingo. But although it’s an appealing production, it seems odd that its protagonist is so little marked by momentous events in modern black history.
Starting in 1963, the show spans three decades in the life of a vivacious middle-class black girl called Viveca. As she grows up in Los Angeles, dreaming of being a dancer, her role models, such as Gwen Verdon’s Lola in Damn Yankees, are conspicuously white. In one of the best songs, Sweet Chitty Chatty, we even see her playing with a robotic blond doll (deftly embodied by Jessica Pardoe) in preference to her black one.
Although Viveca is alarmed by the killing of four young girls in Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, she retains her implacable sunniness. Even when she grows up, experiences racial prejudice and sees a black boyfriend intimidated by the cops, she is always, in the words of one lyric, living her life “in a bubble, floating over trouble”. I began to wonder how the civil rights and black power movements could have had so little effect on her. But the show becomes both sharper and more problematic in the second half, when it moves to New York.
There is a good deal of comedy in Viveca’s experience working in a typing pool and in her encounter, as a young hoofer, with a Broadway legend known simply as Director Bob and clearly based on Bob Fosse. But there is a revealing moment when he tells her at one audition, “Don’t go white on me, Bubbly.” Her immediate response is to offer a grotesque parody of an eye-rolling, deep south servant straight out of Gone With the Wind. She gets the job and the implication is clear: this is what Broadway wanted. Yet I had an immediate flashback to watching Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, which beautifully reflected the complexity of black female experience when it opened on Broadway as early as 1976.
In short, Childs’ musical lets Viveca off the hook for her delayed act of self-realisation. But the score, which embraces multiple idioms from fake Hair anthems to Motown, is highly inventive and acts as a stimulus to Mykal Rand’s first-rate choreography. Karis Jack and Sophia Mackay as the younger and older Viveca capture all her innate bubbliness, Sharon Wattis sings impressively as her mum and Ashley Joseph is hilarious as a hip-wiggling stud whose sexual energy is echoed in Rosa Maggiora’s design by thrusting pistons and trains speeding through tunnels.
- At Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, until 11 March. Box office: 020-8534 0310. Then at the Belgrade theatre, Coventry, 5-15 April. Box office: 024-7655 3055.
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