STAGE WEST: "Blues for an Alabama Sky" at Moxie Theatre

Deja Fields and Carter Piggee in "Blues for an Alabama Sky."                                Photo by Jason Sullivan

            There’s more than a little Sally Bowles in Angel Allen, who like the chanteuse from “Cabaret” residing in an anxious Berlin in the 1930s finds escape in her performances and in booze, except that in Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” Angel’s residing in an early-Depression Harlem. Like Sally’s, Angel’s life is significantly a hot mess.
            But Angel’s got one thing going for her: friends in and around the apartment building she’s crashed in who care about her, starting with her best friend of all – Guy Jacobs, a gay costume maker who dreams of dressing the great Josephine Baker in Paris and who has taken Angel in after she’s lost a job and a gangster boyfriend. Across the hall is Delia Patterson, an earnest social worker with a good heart; and just a jolly “Let the good times roll!” away is the neighborhood doctor Sam Thomas, who endearingly calls his friend (and patient, we learn later) “Angel Eyes.”
            These are Cleage’s characters that inhabit Cleage’s play, giving it life, humor, pathos and relatability. Who among us is lucky enough to have such friends, especially when life deals us a bad hand – or even if we, in our weaknesses and transgressions, deal ourselves that bad hand?
            Moxie Theatre has opened its 21st season with “Blues for an Alabama Sky” under the direction of its artistic director, Desiree Clarke Miller. Though its 90-minute first act is sluggish, the drama- and action-packed second act contributes to this production being the most riveting since Clarke Miller assumed her leadership role at Moxie two years ago. Cleage is an expressive and artful playwright, having created a ‘30s Harlem where historical figures like Rev. Adam Clayton Powell is preaching the Good Word, where Margaret Sanger, advocating for birth control, is Delia’s inspiration, and where Langston Hughes is a poet for the mind and for social change.
            While the struggle for daily survival that Angel (Deja Fields) find herself in is the impetus for most of the first-act tension, it’s the arrival on the scene of a gentleman suitor from the South, Leland Cunningham (Carter Piggee), that ramps up the stakes for Angel and at the same time rattles her friendship circle. It’s as if Cleage has, narratively speaking, lit a slow-burning fuse beneath the floors of Guy’s (Kevane La’Marr Coleman) and Delia’s apartment.
            Prior to Leland’s arrival, we’ve been allowed to revel in the characterizations played out with vibrancy on a Moxie stage that now extends from end to end, mirroring the audience seating area and facilitating a set by Michael Wogulis that depicts Guy’s apartment and the next-door apartment of Delia.
           Coleman is as charismatic as I’ve ever seen him as Guy, without whom Angel might be destitute. He’s also nattily dressed throughout by costume designer Danita Lee. As Sam the doc, Xavier Daniels is so full of life and fun – and yet understated when his affections for the shy and romantically inexperienced Delia (Janine Taylor) begin to bloom – that one longs for a doctor like him. Do they exist?
             The versatile and emotive Fields is following up her star turn in last year’s “Clyde’s” at Moxie with this layered performance, one that doesn’t conceal Angel’s flaws and bad choices in order to win simple sympathy. Her Angel is someone with a case of the blues that won’t go away even when a true romance seems to beckon. Booze, on the other hand, always is what it is.
             The relationship between Angel and Guy, and the chemistry between Fields and Coleman, are the backbone and spirit of “Blues for an Alabama Sky.”
            Cleage’s Delia and especially Leland characters are less fully developed, and when the latter voices his scarcely contained disapproval of the post-Harlem Renaissance liberation of thought and self (and of any behavior outside the purview of his Tuskegee home), the direction of the story and of Angel’s personal destiny seem preordained.
           Its jazzy music fills and intimations of a sweltering heat envelop “Blues for an Alabama Sky” in romance and danger. Though the setting is one Harlem apartment building these lurk both inside and out.
           “Blues for an Alabama Sky” runs through Oct. 26 at Moxie Theatre in Rolando.