'Memphis' at the Walnut Street Theatre

The story starts out strong. Huey Calhoun (Christopher Sutton), a poor, young white man who can’t keep a job — he can’t even read — stumbles into an underground dance club on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. He is drawn by the music, which he calls the “music of my soul” but the whites around him call “race music,” even as their feet can’t stop tapping to its infectious beat. Huey decides he has to share this music with the world, and he does.

As part of his journey to becoming a successful DJ, Huey falls for Felicia Farrell (Kimber Sprawl), the beautiful black singer whose brother Delray (Philip Michael Baskerville) runs the club, and promises to get her on the radio. All that is accomplished by the end of a very long first act, but not without a setback — Huey and Felicia are beaten for daring to fall in love at a time when interracial couples were not accepted.

What’s a second act to do?

There’s not much tension left to drive the story. When Huey is given the choice between New York with Felicia and staying in Memphis, where they have to keep their relationship a secret, we learn that he’s not quite the good guy he started out to be.

In many great romances, the lovers don’t wind up together — think Ilsa and Rick, Scarlett and Rhett — so it’s not surprising that Memphis doesn’t have a happy ending. And Huey as a hero is so flawed — an insecure egotist who is even more controlling of his love object than those who intentionally want to use and abuse her — that we don’t really root for them to get together.

Memphis, based on real events and set in the innocence of the ’50s, is a determinedly cheerful approach to racism, sexism, and poverty. DiPietro’s book solves problems with humor, and the lyrics by DiPietro and Bryan are often obvious statements about the issues — “Everybody Wants to Be Black on a Saturday Night,” “Love Will Stand When All Else Falls,” “Change Don’t Come Easy.”

As Huey, Sutton makes an appealing if unlikely leading man, reminding me of Dustin Hoffman in his attempts at comedy. The beautiful Sprawl has a powerful voice that transcends her character’s vulnerability. Mary Martello as Huey’s mother brings an authenticity to the story, even though her instant conversion by gospel choir is more than a little contrived.

Can musicals solve racism?

None of the songs emerges as a hit you want to sing after you leave the theater. Though the lyrics are no worse than many songs that make it, they just don’t leave you wanting more.

If shows like this, the similarly themed Hairspray, and the new play at Philadelphia Theatre Company, brownsville song, get us talking about race, it’s a good thing. Media in all its forms pushed along the LGBT agenda, so perhaps this can help move racial equality along as well. But does setting hatred to music advance the problem or trivialize it? Does it allow us to see it as resolved when it has just taken on another, perhaps more insidious, form?

What is next, I wonder — Ferguson: The Musical, with a good white cop who falls for a community organizer? Together they bring racial harmony to a divided city, the riots are portrayed in West Side Story-style dancing, and rap music has us singing along.

For a review of the original Broadway production in 2009, click here; for a review of the touring company production at the Academy of Music in 2012, click here. For Rhonda Davis's review of this production, click here.