Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Opening Night: February 6, 2003
Closing: April 6, 2003
Theater: Bernard B. Jacobs
It’s 1927 and the fiery blues legend Gertrude "Ma" Rainey has a golden opportunity to lay down a hit record with her virtuoso band. Inside a cramped Chicago recording studio, the agony and rage bound up in the blues gets amplified when a young talent threatens to dethrone the queen.
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February 7, 2003
IT’S the music, of all things, that’s so conspicuously missing from the hollow new revival of ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s landmark play from 1984 about a blues recording session in jazz-age Chicago. Oh sure, an assortment of peppery period songs still figure in the show, which opened last night at the Royale Theater in an anxiously awaited production starring Charles S. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg.
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