Don’t let the word “opera” scare you. This is a musical. And don’t let the assignation “musical” scare you, either. Queenie Pie serves best as an excuse to revisit 1920s Harlem – in Technicolor stereo. With the Duke Ellington Orchestra pouring the sonic champagne.
Accordingly, “opera” (“a drama set to music and made up of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment and orchestral overtures and interludes”), and your typical “musical” (“a film or theatrical production typically of a sentimental or humorous nature that consists of musical numbers and dialogue based on a unifying plot”) are more or less synonymous. Ellington’s unfinished “opera” Queenie Pie, as staged last weekend at the McCullough Theatre by UT’s Butler School of Music and Butler Opera Center, flourished less drama and unifying plot than either, well, discipline, but musically, it dazzled all the intoxicating hallmarks of the greatest composer/musician these United States ever produced. Queenie Pie drips Ellingtonia from the feather topping her firecracker flapper outfit down to the monarch kissing her toes.
Austin native Carmen Bradford in the title role emanated all the vocal warmth Ellington routinely sought from his singers (“Sure Do Miss New York”), while the bare-chested charisma and vocalized depth of Keithon Gipson as both Lil’ Daddy and the King might as well have been a baritone sax. Morgan Gale Beckford, as Queenie Pie’s uptown rival for top beautician honors (and beaus), performs a wordless scat to make one of Ellington’s trumpet men – Cat Anderson, let’s say – weep into his mute. Sixteen pieces of UT’s Texas Jazz Orchestra, conducted by local jazz elder Jeff Helmer, and held down with elegant subtlety on the 88s by Claire Rhein, wafted all moods indigo. When rhythm, woodwinds, and brass begin sounding like art deco set design and roaring 1920s silks and hats, Ellington has been well and truly conjured.
Catch Queenie Pie before it closes this weekend. “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
This article appears in April 17 • 2009.
