What a vital evening. Lynette Linton’s production of Blues for an Alabama Sky shimmies with ease between the down to earth and dreams. Linton has a gift for creating an entire world on stage, as she did so powerfully four years ago in her production of Sweat at the Donmar. Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in 1930s Harlem, is hefty in subject matter, with debates about gayness, family planning and racial injustice. Yet this is an evening of individual voices, raggedy with poverty but bold with hope. It flies.
At the centre, the pivot of a lively though guessable plot, is Angel, singer and streetwalker. Samira Wiley, who would be a wonderful Sally Bowles, sparkles with seductive egotism: put-upon and tough, alluring as she calls to men from her window, ruthless as she snaps her fan shut on another torrid, champagne-swilled episode. Yet Wiley does not simply dominate. As her earnest boarding-house companion, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo is soberly magnificent. Listen to her drop her voice a tone as she slides from being churchgoer to lover: “yes” she says as her doctor suitor asks if he can shut the door (the audience sigh with pleasure); then “yes”, much deeper in her throat, when he asks if he should lock it: the audience applaud.
