You know the feeling: Every lyric delivered at the same pitch. Blank expressions. Arms raised, savior-style, as the solution to every staging problem. Actors anticipating their own exits and letting their lines trail off accordingly, dead air.
The feeling is that of amateur hour (or two hours), the stuff of backyards, open mikes or — in the case of “Yemandja” — the rec room of a house of worship. For to those other flaws, this musical adds the hallmarks of a religious pageant. Repeated proverbs make up a bunch of its dialogue. Scenes end on life lessons so pat you might feel as if you’ve been mistaken for a child. Characters are cardboard cutouts.
It feels strange to write these words about a musical at Zellerbach Hall, where theCal Performancesteam can almost always be relied upon for rigorous artistic standards and sophisticated taste. It feels blasphemous, too, to apply that description to five-time Grammy winnerAngélique Kidjo,whose vocal power, stylistic range and fierce advocacy have made her an artistic ambassador not just for her home country of Benin but for the continent of Africa. She co-conceived (with Jean Hebrail and Naïma Hebrail Kidjo), co-composed (with Hebrail) and stars in the show, a Cal Performances co-commission capping her yearlong residency with the UC Berkeley presenter.
“Yemandja,” which played for one night on Saturday, April 23, has still other marks that ought to be in its favor. In imagining a tale of the Yoruba water deity of the same name and her West African worshipers as they confront the slave trade, “Yemandja” proposes exactly the kind of story American theater doesn’t hear often enough.
Yet from its first moments, “Yemandja” fails to capitalize on its hefty assets. It narrates rather than enacts. It takes the importance of its plot points — the birth of a baby, the clash between deities Yemandja (Kidjo) and Orò (Frank Lawson) — for granted rather than justifying why the audience ought to care about them. You’re gazing at the stage, Cheryl Lynn Bruce’s direction seems to say. Isn’t that enough?
Choreography by Beatrice Capote does little more than march or bop in place. In one scene, when the actors brandish fighting sticks, it looks as if they’re holding them for the first time, so lost are they as to what to do with them.
“Yemandja” takes pains to make the arguments that slavery is bad, that power corrupts, that “violence begets violence.” But when slave trader DeSalta (John Carlin) kills Adefola (April Nixon), her husband, Loko (George L. Brown), and daughter, Omolola (Briana Brooks), barely seem sad, as if they either expected her to die or live in a world where human display of emotion isn’t possible.
更糟糕的是,当Yemandja指南Omolola多-stop flashback to persuade her to use the gift of song Yemandja gave her to stop the slave trade, the show, which has a book and lyrics by Naïma Hebrail Kidjo (Angélique Kidjo’s daughter), gives an I-had-a-rough-childhood backstory to DeSalta, as if lack of love in individual interpersonal relationships explained empire, colonialism, racism, capitalism and enslavement. “Yemandja” is here to tell us that all we have to do is choose empathy over hate, to engage but not necessarily forgive, to see monsters as human.
Fans of Kidjo’s sheer vocal chops got a few moments of smartly sculpted melismas and virtuoso displays of strength on opening night. But a great voice is necessary but not sufficient for musical theater. If you were to ask any of the “Yemandja” characters why they have to sing right now, why there’s no other option, their only apparent answer is that someone told them to.