THE Magazine - Dallas / Forthworth

With Sam Shade: A Detective Musical, Jubilee Theatre went old-school ¯ meaning back to the days before the 2005 death of founder and artistic director Rudy Eastman, when he and musical collaborator Joe Rogers regularly created clever send-ups. Shows like Negroes in Space and Alice Wonder could be counted on for rollicking fun and, in the case of Lysistrata, Please, a message.

Since Mr. Eastman's death, Jubilee has made a few attempts at original work. But none have come as close to the Eastman-Rogers dynamic as Sam Shade, which featured music, lyrics and book by Mr. Rogers and was directed by Tyrone King for its August run. A spoof of 1930s and '40s film noir, the music and songs were heavy on the blues, with a touch of hip-hop and Broadway patter. But while there was plenty of funny material in the story, which largely plays off The Maltese Falcon and The Invisible Man, it could have used some editing (that's where Mr. Eastman would have been helpful).

Steven Griffin played the title character, a gumshoe working with his brother, Spike Harding (Robert L. Rouse). Their mission was to find a certain fowl statue, a treasure that everyone wants, including gangsters Hymie Butman (Major Attaway) and Dickie Lydell (Aaron Petite) and a countess named Carlotta (Michele Rene). Naturally, Shade fell for her, while his devoted Girl Friday, Lucy Lipschlitz (Sheran Goodspeed Keyton) waited for him to notice her.

Other characters included the wacky scientist, Dr. Pecherstone (William Hass) and his girl Fannie LaFontaine (Saudra D. Peterson), nightclub singer Trixie Upskert (Crystal P. Williams) and Delicia Oliver (Stormi Demerson), a random chick in tight dresses and one appearance as a hippie. As another anachronism, there were several clever references to Michael Jackson. Mr. Shade's flaw is that he's in a musical but can't sing, especially tragic in a cast that included big voices from Rene, Demerson, Rouse, and Keyton, who knocks it out on the show's best number, the love song "Why Don't You." Mr. Rogers has really outdone himself with clever lyrics throughout, notably in Butman and Lydell's buddy song "In This Together."

Most of the other songs served as plot and character setups, but only about half the cast understood the stylized comedy that should accompany the corny jokes and broad characterizations of spoof. George Miller's set design of storybook foldout backdrops looked good, but they were changed so often that it became distracting. Mr. Eastman might have fixed such problems, but Sam Shade is evidence that new musicals are still in reach at Jubilee.

In the Jubilee's continuing playlist of celebrating the African-American experience, The Gospel Queen focuses on one of gospel music's greatest sensations, Mahlia Jackson. Sheran Goodspeed Keyton embodies the iconic singer's charismatic performing style while bringing new life to the songs that made Ms. Jackson "The Queen of Gospel Music." With her powerful, distinct voice, Ms. Jackson became one of the most influential gospel singers in the world before her death in 1972 at the age of sixty. Her good friend Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "A voice like hers comes along once in a millennium." Ms. Jackson grew up in Chicago and thrived off of the styling of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, but it was the church to which she pledged her allegiance. She believed that rock and roll was stolen out of the church. The musical shows her deep spiritual motivation and her world travels. Ed Smith directs The Gospel Queen with musical direction by Joe Rogers.

Adapting a Toni Morrison novel, with her vivid descriptions and poetically contorted narratives, can''t be an easy assignment. But playwright Lydia R. Diamond has done it right in her faithful and highly theatrical take on Morrison''s first novel, The Bluest Eye. The story found another soul mate in Ed Smith, who directed a textured area premiere at his Jubilee Theatre.

Ms. Morrison''s prologue of short declarative sentences about a house, its colors, and its Dick-and-Jane inhabitants, for instance, might have been abandoned in more straightforward adaptation. In Ms. Diamond''s vision, the cast enters and repeats these statements (""Here is the house. It has a red door. See Jane. She wants to play."") in unison, and then staggered, as if to warn about how dreams usually fragment. It serves both as an announcement of the scintillating theatricality to follow.

The Bluest Eye focuses on three girls in 1940s rural Ohio: Claudia (Sydney Sherow) and Frieda (Lisa B. Whitfield), who belong to a mother (Jennifer Patton) too busy with chores to pay them much mind; and Pecola (Shundra Grubb), who views herself as invisible in a world that views pale skin and blonde hair as beauty standards. Although her life is filled with tragedy, this physical and sexual abuse victim doesn't give up her hope for blue eyes.

Her story is mostly narrated by Claudia and Frieda, and later, a creepy Caribbean mystic called Soaphead (Bill Hass). As in Morrison''s novel, there is some time -jumping, and Diamond smartly uses the device of three gossipy women to comment on the action, Greek chorus-style. The author''s image-filled language (""and the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake"") stays in, too.

It's a difficult show to cast. With Pecola especially, a child actress wouldn''tt understand the character''s complexities, and the sexual scenes would be awkward. Ms. Grubb is probably in her mid-20s or beyond, but somehow she transforms herself into an insecure, developmentally challenged teen. It's a stunning performance. Ms. Sherow and Ms. Whitfield also believably channel childish things but are never less than three-dimensional,; and LaWonda Hunter does wonders as two separated-by-race characters, the high yellow beauty Maureen and a spoiled white girl.

Michael Skinner''s set is simple and strikingly representational, with eye shapes on the benches and a mosaic floor design; and smudgy mirrors that reflect the idea of not wanting to see our true selves.

In the end, Pecola is thrilled that her wish has been granted. But the playgoer is overwhelmed by sadness, knowing that this girl' story can never truly have a happy ending. And that's how Ms. Morrison would have it.

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a story about the tragic life of a young black girl in 1940's Ohio. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove wants nothing more than to be loved by her family and schoolmates. Instead, she faces constant ridicule and abuse. She blames her dark skin and prays for blue eyes, sure that love will follow. With rich language and bold vision, this powerful adaptation of an American classic explores the crippling toll that a legacy of racism has taken on a community, a family, and an innocent girl. Lydia Diamond has translated Morrison's poetic language with supple eloquence in this powerful coming-of-age story. Jubilee Artistic Director Ed Smith shapes it for the local stage.

Ntozake Shange's unique, award-winning tale of the African-American woman's journey in America was first performed in Berkeley, California, in 1975. Taking For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf to New York City in 1976 entailed polishing the act for a more demanding, theater-sophisticated audience than the appreciative and supportive, mostly female, audiences in the cafes and women's bars of San Francisco. Ms. Shange, just twenty-seven at the time, relied on theater director Oz Scott to transform the twenty separate poems into a unified and cohesive play, sharpening the theatrical elements along the way. The predominantly black audiences of the Joseph Papp Anspacher Theater production reacted with obvious pride and exhilaration. Some thirty years later, the fluid collection of vivid prose and free verse narratives performed by young black women continues to be relevant. Almost exclusively concerned with the cavalier and sometimes brutal treatment accorded black women by their men, the characters capture inner feelings that infuse a unique universality. Though their performances are mainly solo, the women are united in sorrow, spirit, pride, and soul. Sometimes they sing together and dance together. The play has its moments of laughter and joy as well, and although the women in it express a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in their lives, it transcends male-bashing and becomes a message of self-respect and reverence.