Even audiences unfamiliar with Bessie Smith are probably familiar with her image. The best-selling black musician of her era, Smith was nearly as legendary for her appetites as her music, almost single-handedly creating the archetype of the full-figured, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous blues singer. And though she recorded during the ’20s and ’30s, when studio technology was too primitive to capture the full majesty of her voice, her records are nonetheless some of the most enduring the genre has ever produced.
Zonya Love is tasked with filling Smith’s shoes in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith, and it’s hard to imagine anybody better equipped for the role. Love has Smith’s voice down pat—robust and commanding, yet soft and vulnerable around the edges—but she’s also a powerhouse actress, and she puts those acting chops to work during the show’s many monologues, which are often just as rousing as the music. In imagined conversations with her pianist Pickle the night before her death, Smith shares her triumphs between pulls from a flask: being turned down by a record label for being “too black,” then going on to sell 780,000 copies of her first single for Columbia; standing up to a horde of Klansmen; and spending countless nights in the company of men and women alike. Her tales grow increasingly sorrowful as the night goes on.
No doubt the Rep was looking to springboard off the success of last spring’s Low Down Dirty Blues and the perennially popular Ain’t Misbehavin’ with this production, but for all of the bawdy laughs it delivers, Devil’s Music is considerably heavier than either of those feel-good shows. Playwright Angelo Parra doesn’t sugarcoat the tragedy in Smith’s biography, the story of an extraordinary talent who clawed her way to the top, lost everything and died before she had a chance to complete the comeback everybody believed she was capable of. With her megawatt charisma, Love does such an outstanding job bringing the singer to life that her death feels like a fresh loss.
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The show runs through March 20 at the Rep’s Stackner Cabaret, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, call 414-224-9490 or visit milwaukeerep.com.
