Set in 1930s Harlem, the Firehouse Theater production soars with a splendid cast

In Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play Blues for an Alabama Sky, the action starts appropriately with a drunken scene followed by a devastating hangover. It’s 1930 in Harlem, and the Roaring Twenties have yielded to the misery of the Great Depression. The creative and cultural explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance is also deeply impacted, with the glory days of hotspots like the Cotton Club in the rear-view mirror.

Under the crisp, loving direction of Adrienne Martin-Fullwood, Firehouse Theater Company brings this script to life with a to-die-for cast. Centered around out-of-work singer Angel (Nadiya Jackson) and her flamboyantly gay, fashion-designer bestie Guy (Johnathan Underwood), Blues is a great choice for Black History Month. It’s a poignant, often funny story that resonates strongly between then and now.

It’s Angel who Sam and a passerby have carted home drunk after she insulted the club owner and gets canned. She also loses her place to stay in the process, and Guy takes her in. The pair came up to Harlem together from the South, with Angel clearly the instigator and woman of action. She’s also a bit of a train wreck, and the falling out with her mobster sugar daddy is likely just the latest in a series of fixes Guy’s had to save her from.

It’s a neat relationship between the two, and Jackson and Underwood turn in powerful performances portraying them. The self-destructive Angel may be a familiar type, but Cleage also instills in her an almost nihilistic take on the Black population in Harlem. Seeing herself as just another out-of-work singer along 125^th Street, she longs for the simple stability she thinks a solid man might deliver. When the helpful stranger from the night before turns up the next day, she thinks she might’ve found him. But the story takes a darker turn as the Alabama carpenter Leland (Jozeph Mykeals) is soon revealed to be entirely too conservative to fit in with Angel’s crew.

The other two characters are next-door neighbor Delia (Marissa Joy Leotaud) and the circle’s doctor friend Sam (Jysten Atom). A bit of a Dr. Feelgood type, Sam drinks and smokes too much in between delivering babies and hitting the jazz clubs. His catchphrase is “Let the good times roll,” and Atom really nails this role. A 40-year-old bachelor, Sam is nonetheless open to love — and the perfect mate may be standing right in front of him.

Equally effective and likable is Leotaud as Delia. A nerdy, adorable virgin who’s helping famed birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger stand up a clinic in Harlem, Delia is the pure yin to Angel’s jaded yang. But by the end of the play, she’ll have gotten a healthy dose of the shitty side of life as well.

Nadiya Jackson as Angel and Johnathan Underwood as Guy in ‘Blues for an Alabama Sky’ at Firehouse Theater. | Photo: FTC

Troubled times

Blues sprinkles plenty of history throughout its story, referencing the famous pastor-politician Adam Clayton Powell, who runs the nearby Baptist church. Sam is a member, and through him we get snippets of some of the cultural upheavals taking place outside. The biggest influence is the world-famous actor-singer Josephine Baker. She may be in Paris, but her muse is ever-present, and Guy’s life dream is to design outfits for her. Someday, perhaps, he’ll get the call and he and Angel will be lifted out of poverty to live large across the pond.

Underwood is a dynamo as Guy, presenting a deeply complex character beneath a defiantly gay exterior. When he gets beaten up by some thugs who don’t like how he dresses, he brushes it off as part of the price of being who he wants to be. Guy provides a lot of the laugh lines in the show while also effectively depicting the rocky path of a Black gay man in the early 20^th century. His love for Angel is pure and deep, and when she veers off the path he had planned for them, it’s accompanied by a stinging betrayal.

A Denver native, Jackson is fairly new on the scene, and I look forward to seeing more of her on Colorado stages. Her portrayal of Angel is high-powered, authentic and deeply affecting as she brings out the character’s conflicting desires. Cleage’s script does a nice job illustrating why and how Angel and Guy do what they do, and clearly Martin-Fullwood worked closely with the two actors to develop these characters so convincingly.

Ultimately, it’s Leland whose actions drive the climax, and Mykeals handles nicely the unenviable task of the outsider who amazes the others with his ultra-conservative views. As we watch that part of America in ascendance today, it’s yet another reminder that this stuff never goes away.