You can’t fault Todrick Hall for lack of ambition. The 41-year-old multihyphenate, who turned an American Idol run into fame on YouTube with detours on MTV and RuPaul’s Drag Race, now stakes his claim on musical theater with an audacious nearly three-hour sung-through musical set on a plantation in the antebellum American South. There is a great musical in Midnight — possibly two or three — but it gets lost in the beautiful but bloated production that opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Daryl Roth Theatre.
Hall has crafted a memorably catchy and eclectic score that draws on both musical theater tropes (with some operatic flourishes) as well as pop, R&B and gospel. There are some absolute bangers here, including intricate choral harmonies that are truly gorgeous. There are also a fair number of place-holding clunkers, and would-be showstoppers lined up back-to-back like pageant queens trying to outdo the competitor who came just before.
In an ideal world, a strong, experienced director or producer would sit down with the book writer, composer, and lyricist to help hone the material: to trim the fat, tighten the storytelling, and to pinpoint moments that don’t quite land (sometimes because they are blatantly anachronistic for a period piece like this). In this case, Hall holds all of these roles — in addition to choreographer and star — which perhaps explains why a show that is so packed with promise falls so messily short of its target.
Hall’s premise is a provocative one, to retell Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play as a musical — while also injecting elements of everything from Hamilton to Cinderella, not to mention The Color Purple, Suffs, and Brokeback Mountain. Hall stars as an enslaved man named Rail, orphaned at a young age on a plantation, who catches the eye of a white man named Richard (Jeremy Beloate). Richard is presented as an improbably ahead-of-his-time defender of Black people, an allyship he credits to the Black maid who raised him after his mother’s death when he was 3. While Rail is technically the property of Richard’s fiancée, Scarlett (Kennedy Caughell), he is working under Richard to build the man’s new house when Richard makes the first romantic move. Needless to say, this is not a romance launched on equal footing. Soon, Richard is “educating” his secret paramour by teaching him to read, write, and swim (to complete the racial stereotype trifecta).
Yes, there is a jarring power imbalance here that Hall mostly chooses to ignore. His attempts to treat this dalliance as a great queer love story that’s tragically ahead of its time is undercut by both Rail’s initial reluctance as well as the glaring lack of chemistry between the two actors. He also seems more interested in the idea of the relationship than in fleshing out characters who seem destined to be together; after one impulsive kiss, they spend most of their time writing mash notes to each other. Not that Rail shows much more romantic spark with the woman he’s impregnated: Lily (Charlotte Odusanya), a lovesick sweetie who sings repeatedly about Rail’s “pretty eyes” and wonders about her lover’s ambivalence in sidebars with her blunt-talking bestie, Happy (Kolbi Joran). Hall is a talented performer, with a silky R&B voice, but too often he carries a look of grim determination rather than ardor or fear or whatever emotion is called for in any individual scene.
To his credit, though, Hall has created a true ensemble piece and handed the strongest songs to a cast of powerhouse vocalists, who deliver with ceiling-rattling bravado. Ayana George, who narrates much of the show as longtime plantation worker Ethel, opens each act with a full-volume wake-up call. She also gets the show’s most moving tune, “The Dancing One,” an evocation of her twinkled-toed son who was lynched after dancing with “a girl who ain’t honey brown.” There’s a tragic, poetic beauty to Hall’s lyrics here, and a simplicity to the storytelling that’s truly astounding. Odusanya and Jordan also get standout moments to flex their pipes and belt out impressive vocal runs.
Midnight looks spectacular, with a wood-paneled, turntable set by Morgan Large and pinpoint lighting design by Jake DeGroot that both owe much to Hamilton. Beck Jones’s lush costumes, which hang on dress forms at the start of the show, are as astonishingly portrait-perfect as Charles G. LaPointe’s hair and wig designs. And the many musical numbers are supplemented by Hall’s spirited choreography, which ranges from ballet to jazz to waltz to syncopated drumline as the number demands. The stage is barely big enough to fit the entire 20-person cast.
Hall’s admirable ambition frequently works to the show’s detriment. He has too many ideas, too many songs to cram into one slender show, and imposes too much structure to tell a simple story well. After a lengthy first act introducing a whopping 12 characters, he pulls a switcheroo where the white actors and Black actors swap places in parallel roles. Hall dons a frilly coat as Richard, and Beloate puts on work clothes as Rail; the rest of the cast follow suit. The idea is hastily and sloppily introduced in a rushed Act 1 closer about getting the whites to walk a mile in the shoes of their enslaved workers — and we learn only later that this is a one-day-only swap due to expire, Cinderella-like, at midnight on the day of Richard’s wedding to Southern belle Scarlet.
The idea does allow Hall to depict some of the show’s most horrific brutality as it’s inflicted by Black actors on white bodies, which complicates the audience’s response if not entirely mitigating its horror. The move also enables the Black principals to shine while singing in more traditional musical theater or even operatic styles; the white actors’ attempts at more soulful, R&B, or gospel modes are, unsurprisingly, less convincing. But the swap doesn’t deepen our understanding of Richard and Rail’s fledgling romance — and a mid-act revelation further complicates matters. Moreover, does anyone in 21st-century America need to see indentured whites to “get” the injustice of slavery? The gambit just removes us further from the star-crossed love story that’s supposedly at the heart of the show.
Even great creators need strong collaborators, sounding boards who will nudge them to revise, streamline, and “murder their darlings” in the service of producing a better final product. Midnight has flashes of luminous greatness, but too often Hall does not know when to stop. There’s a meandering final song, full of muddled references to the number 12 and spoken-word updates on the progress made toward equality for Blacks and queer people in the U.S. since the 1860s, that feels utterly superfluous. Especially when compared to encore song that Hall leads post-curtain call, a choral masterpiece that perfectly sums up the “new day” that the show envisions and sends the audience out on a goosebumpy high. ★★★☆☆
MIDNIGHT
The Daryl Roth Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 3 hours (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 8 for $140 to $500