NEW YORK — Jaws clenched, limbs firing and hearts on the line: That’s what the admirable cast of the gutsy “Paradise Square” is delivering at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. They’re led by a blockbuster lead performance from Joaquina Kalukango, who makes her audience care about the struggling denizens of her character Nelly O’Brien’s titular saloon partly through the talents of the multitasking young composer Jason Howland, but mostly by her resolute force of will.
The visceral intensity of all the performances in this new musical — set in a bar in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan during the New York draft riots of 1863 — surely is indicative not just of the long, hard slog to beat back COVID-19 and wrestle an original musical to Broadway.
It also matches the themes of a show wrestling mightily with not just a notorious part of the history of New York City, but the ongoing racial acrimony still slapping at a fraught nation. Clearly, it’s part of a controversial veteran producer’s wish to finish a weighty musical triptych: Garth Drabinsky sees “Paradise Square” as a prequel to his “Showboat” and “Ragtime.”
