Music carries message in slave story 'Dessa'
WATERTOWN - Like "Ragtime," the musical for which Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are best known, the team's "Dessa Rose" is a sincere, complex attempt to tell a powerful story about race in a serious musical form. And, again like "Ragtime," it succeeds best when its creators allow the music to carry the story, rather than when the convolutions of narrative and exposition bog it down.
In "Dessa Rose," making its New England debut in an energetic New Repertory Theatre production, that means the strongest moments come in the second act. Earlier, the competing tales of a pregnant slave who led a rebellion and an abandoned white woman whose isolated farm became a refuge for runaways are so packed with event and explanation as to clog the machinery. Fortunately, the loveliness of Flaherty's music (full of gospel, spiritual, blues, and other appropriate influences) and the powerful, impassioned performances of New Rep's cast keep this production beating smoothly along, even through its most overstuffed passages.
As the slave-turned-rebel Dessa Rose, Uzo Aduba creates a magnetic center for the show, with a rich, strong voice to match her vivid physical characterization. Ahrens's book demands that she move instantly from narrating her story as an old woman to living it as a young one, a tricky transition that Aduba handles expertly. Just 16 when she sees the man she loves struck dead by their master, Dessa Rose reveals a quick inner strength and fury that propel her through a retaliatory assault, then into a murderous rebellion against the trader she's sold to as punishment - and Aduba moves through all that more smoothly than such a crammed story line would seem to allow.
New Rep favorite Leigh Barrett faces similar challenges as Ruth, who begins as a 19-year-old Charleston belle, then grows up fast when her charming planter husband takes off on an extended gambling toot, leaving her alone in the backwoods with their newborn daughter. Barrett seems too mature in her scenes as the girlish Ruth, but her depth and wisdom feel just right when the oblivious debutante grows into a compassionate woman enraged by the injustices of slavery, and her gorgeous singing, as always, creates a richly layered character.
Ahrens occasionally preaches too overtly, as in the opening anthem "We Are Descended," in which the whole company declaims an exhortation to listen up and learn something. At the show's best moments, however, that pedantic tone gives way to something warmer and more humane; Ruth's lonely lament "At the Glen" and a haunting love ballad, "In the Bend of My Arm," feel touching and real. Late in the show, "White Milk and Red Blood," sung by the spirit of the black woman who raised Ruth, leaves an indelible sense of the complicated bond shared by women, of any color, in a culture that treats them as property.
What's most interesting about the relationship Ahrens builds between Dessa Rose and Ruth is that it isn't simple; they rely on each other, they learn to trust each other, they probably even love each other, but they often don't like each other much. The men of "Dessa Rose," unfortunately, tend to be less complex.
Although Todd Alan Johnson sings and moves wonderfully as Adam Nehemiah, a writer who interviews Dessa Rose and then becomes her nemesis once she uses him to escape, even his performance can't make the man more than a cutout villain. Similarly, newcomer De'Lon Grant is charismatic as Dessa's doomed lover, Kaine, and Edward M. Barker has a charming turn as another escaped slave, Nathan, but both characters are as one-dimensionally good as Nehemiah is bad.
After his success with "Ragtime" in 2006, New Rep producing artistic director Rick Lombardo was understandably eager to tackle "Dessa Rose." His streamlined staging, with Kelli Edwards's lively choreography taking full advantage of Peter Colao's elegantly rough-hewn set of ragged planks, generally clarifies even the most muddled moments, though a few times the characters' spatial relationships feel confusing. At its best, this is a full-bodied, powerful rendering of a complicated but ultimately satisfying show.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
