Review: The gospel’s sung but not dramatized in ‘Marie and Rosetta’

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Michelle E. Jordan, left) and Marie Knight (Marissa Rudd) perform roof-raising music in TheatreWorks’ “Marie and Rosetta” at Lucie Stern Theatre. Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks

There’s a sensation and a sound you can create if you scrunch up your face to flex all its muscles — like you’re bracing for something, as a low rumble swells in your ear canals. It’s a little bit like an ache’s throb, but it’s not painful. It’s as if you’re activating a part of yourself that normally lies dormant, as if the walls of some deep cavity are tingling into being.

That feeling might normally have internal cause and internal effects, but that’s not the case in TheatreWorks’ “Marie and Rosetta.” The singing of performers Marissa Rudd and Michelle E. Jordan is so potent, so probing, it’s as if their voices somehow know about what was hitherto a private matter between your brain and your nerve fibers.

Protege Marie Knight (Marissa Rudd) learns how to add swing to her sound from chart-topping gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Michelle E. Jordan). Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks

If George Brant’s play with music about gospel singers Marie Knight and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were concert instead of theater, the Bay Area might be in danger of a third Great Awakening. But the West Coast premiere, which opened Saturday, March 9, at Lucie Stern Theatre, doesn’t measure up to the musicians who star in it and the musicians it chronicles.

It’s not for want of a laudable goal. Tharpe, in particular, with her unrestrained vocal passion and her virtuoso guitar picking, influenced musicians ranging from Little Richard to Elvis, from Jimi Hendrix to Johnny Cash, though she’s little known today.

“Marie and Rosetta” seeks to flesh out the historical record by telling the story of Tharpe’s partnership with Knight, whose cream-smooth contralto blended sumptuously with Tharpe’s earthy belt. The script works best when Marie (Rudd) and Rosetta (Jordan) are simply exhibiting their musical gifts for each other, sans jealousy or rivalry, dynamics that so many writers default to in documenting professional relationships between women. There’s no catfight here. Each artist owns her talent without insecurity and savors the talent of her partner.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Michelle E. Jordan, left) and Marie Knight (Marissa Rudd). Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks

But elsewhere, the script is a muddle. Rosetta is supposedly rehearsing with Marie for the first time after happening to hear her perform, so why is Marie putting makeup on her like a familiar hired hand? Why is Marie both anxious to be accepted by Rosetta yet also disdaining her for not being religious enough?

In the sitting of one first rehearsal, they zip from auditioning for each other, to each compromising on the balance of religion and secularism in their lyrics, to Marie’s deciding to divorce her husband for the act, to Rosetta’s cursorily lamenting the scourges of blackface and segregation. It’s never clear how long the pair have known each other, nor what each perceives as her obstacle in any given exchange.

The funeral home where they rehearse — the only place black performers can sleep, Rosetta says — is redolent of sadness to come, thanks to Christopher Fitzer’s set design, all plush blues and pinks and browns, and it’s lovingly lit by Steven B. Mannshardt’s lighting design with a crepuscular glow that suggests ghosts behind the walls, under the coffins. But those velvety visuals get poorly used in Robert Kelley’s direction, which further flattens already expository passages. When Rosetta drops the phrase “any of my husbands,” signaling that a mighty wave of back story thunders on the horizon, the duo march to the far side of the stage, plop themselves down in chairs and sit for the duration of the unspooling.

Gospel great Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Michelle E. Jordan) sings to the heavens. Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks

Rudd plays Marie with the overheated melodrama of a black-and-white movie star — all tremulous when it’s not clear what there is to tremble at, shamefully casting her eyes down when there’s nothing to be ashamed of, wresting away from a grasp that doesn’t exist. Jordan seems like she wants to portray Rosetta as a brassy, worldly wise businesswoman, but the signals she sends out don’t reach Rudd’s Marie.

When they sing, though, backed up offstage by pianist William Liberatore and guitarist Schuyler McFadden, they are gloriously, piercingly in sync — harmonies that glorify a Christian God and rock ‘n’ roll alike.

L “Marie and Rosetta”: Written by George Brant. Directed by Robert Kelley. Through March 31. One hour, 40 minutes. $40-$100, subject to change. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 650-463-1960.

  • Lily Janiak