The African-American experience in different decades of the 20th Century is explored with ingenuity and passion in two new Off-Broadway musicals. Both feature eclectic and captivating scores, but unlike the overly obvious Black no More, Intimate Apparel, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, succeeds in telling its relatable story to become an integrated and powerful piece.
An operatic version of Lynn Nottage’s award-winning 2003 play, Intimate Apparel tells of a lonely seamstress seeking love and security. Set in 1905, the opera focuses on Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown in a searing vocal and dramatic performance) who earns a living creating sexually provocative bedroom wear and yearns to find the kind of romance that her garments facilitate. (Catharine Zuber’s dazzling costumes clearly delineate the roles these women must play in order to survive.) Oppressed because of her race and gender, Esther is self-reliant but isolated.
Her clients represent different strata of society, but each faces her own form of degradation. The white socialite Mrs. Van Buren (regal yet sensual Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has no feeling for her wealthy husband, yet she commissions Esther to create scandalous negligees to keep him interested. The black entertainer and prostitute Mayme (sexy yet vulnerable Krysty Swann) needs Esther’s designs to earn her living since she cannot find employment in any other field. Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich, particularly moving in her biographical aria), Esther’s landlady, runs a social club for respectable young African-American ladies to find suitable husbands. Esther sews wedding gowns for them. But Mrs. Dickson’s girls are just as much for sale as Mayme since they must put security above love.
Esther appears to have found a way out of her loneliness when she begin corresponding with George (virile and sly Justin Austin), a laborer on the Panama Canal, but her dreams are shattered when the real George arrives in person to wed her. She eventually realizes her true love is forbidden since she is drawn to a white, Orthodox Jewish fabric salesman (empathic Arnold Livingston Geis).
Director Bartlett Sher skillfully employs Michael Yeargen’s spare, revolving set for a fluid production, perfectly integrated with Ricky Ian Gordon’s melodious music melding ragtime with blues and Broadway, played by two pianos under the masterful music direction of Steven Osgood. Nottage wrote the libretto, paring down her own play for maximum musical expression. The exquisite voices of the cast blend with their dramatic skills for a heart-wrenching portrait of the struggle to overcome oppression and find comfort in a racist and sexist world.
