Displaying items by tag: Al’Jaleel McGhee

Goodman Theatre’s production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom arrives with the weight of expectation - and under the dual direction of Chuck Smith and Harry Lennix, it does not merely meet that weight, it reshapes it. This is not a revival of August Wilson’s searing text; it is a precise, muscular excavation of its tensions, its music, and its truths.

From the outset, the production leans into what makes Ma Rainey distinct within Wilson’s canon: its compression. There is no sprawling Hill District, no generational sweep - only a room, a day, and a reckoning. Smith and Lennix understand this pressure-cooker structure and allows it to simmer deliberately. The pacing is patient but never indulgent, each pause and eruption calibrated to expose the fractures between the woman, the men and the system that contains them.

At the center stands E. Faye Butler’s Ma Rainey, and “center” is not metaphorical - it is gravitational. Butler embodies what makes Ma singular among Wilson’s women: she is not surviving the system, she is making the system bend to her will. Where characters like Rose in Fences or Bertha in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone endure with moral resilience, Ma operates with economic and performative authority. Butler’s Ma is unapologetically self-possessed, openly sensual in her relationship with Dussie Mae, and fiercely aware of her value. Every demand - a Coca-Cola, a delay, a correction - is less eccentricity than strategy. She dictates the terms, and the room adjusts.

Surrounding her is a cast that functions both as ensemble and as volatile elements in a dramatic equation. Al’Jaleel McGhee’s Levee is electric, restless, and dangerously unmoored. He captures the tragic duality of the character: brilliance tethered to illusion. His performance builds like a slow burn until it detonates, revealing the unresolved trauma and misplaced faith in a system that will never reward him. In contrast, David Alan Anderson’s Cutler is grounded, pragmatic, a man who has learned the cost of survival. Kelvin Roston, Jr.’s Toledo brings intellectual weight, his reflections on Black identity landing with quiet force, while Cedric Young’s Slow Drag occupies the margins with understated authenticity.

The white power structure—embodied by Matt DeCaro’s Sturdyvant and Marc Grapey’s Irvin - is rendered with chilling subtlety. There is no overt villainy here, only the smooth machinery of exploitation. Irvin’s politeness is the point; it is the veneer that makes the system function.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at Goodman Theatre. (L-R) Jabari Khaliq, E. Faye Butler, Kelvin Roston Jr.

Visually, the production is nothing short of exquisite. Linda Buchanan’s set design transforms the stage into a 1920s Chicago recording studio that feels both expansive and suffocating. The inclusion of distinct spaces - the recording area, control room, rehearsal room, even a suggestion of the street - creates a dynamic environment while maintaining the play’s essential confinement. This is a world built for observation and control.

Jared Gooding’s lighting design elevates this world into something almost cinematic. The suggestion of the Chicago Loop’s overhead train is particularly striking, its presence looming like an industrial heartbeat. Gooding uses light not just for visibility but for composition - creating tableaus, isolating tensions, and guiding the audience’s eye with precision.

And then there are Evelyn M. Danner’s costumes, which operate as visual dramaturgy. The color palette tells its own story: Irvin and Sturdyvant in stark black and white, embodiments of rigid power; the band in various shades of brown, signaling labor, reliability, and earthbound existence; and Ma Rainey in a commanding money-green dress, a walking declaration of her worth. Dussie Mae’s yellow flapper dress, accented with green, subtly marks her proximity to that wealth and power. Even Sylvester’s patterned brown attire hints at his connection to Ma’s orbit. Every choice is intentional, every color a statement.

What ultimately distinguishes this production is its understanding of language - not just Wilson’s text, but the music within it. The scenes among the band members crackle with rhythm and lyricism, their banter and arguments forming a kind of blues composition. It is beautiful, but volatile - a powder keg of masculinity, frustration, and deferred dreams.

What Chuck Smith and Harry Lennix achieve is extraordinary. They do not merely stage Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; they orchestrate it, allowing every performance, every design element, every silence to resonate with intention. Nowhere is that more evident than in Levee’s arc, where Al’Jaleel McGhee delivers a performance that simmers with ambition and barely contained rage, his volatility carefully shaped into a slow, inevitable unraveling.

This is direction of the highest order - precise, unflinching, and deeply attuned to the rhythms of Wilson’s language and the weight of his themes. What emerges is not just unforgettable theatre, but necessary theatre: a production that insists we listen more closely, look more deeply, and reckon more honestly with the truths it lays before us.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: Through May 3

Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.

Tickets: $44-$84

Info: www.goodmantheatre.org

Box Office: 312-443-3800

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

Goodman Theatre launches its 2025/26 season at the Owen with Revolution(s), a world premiere musical that thunders with urgency and defiance. Written by Zayd Ayers Dohrn—2016 Horton Foote New American Play Prize winner and son of Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground—the play carries the weight of history and the pulse of rebellion. With music by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fame and direction by Steve H. Broadnax III, Revolution(s) explodes onto the stage as both a call to arms and a meditation on generational resistance.

Dohrn’s daring script weaves two timelines into one charged narrative. In 1989, African-American veteran Leon (Al’Jaleel McGhee) and his quick-thinking, idealistic wife Emma (Jackie Burns) find themselves fugitives, forced to flee with their newborn twin sons. Their flight captures the uneasy tension of a generation torn between paranoia and hope—a time when the dream of revolution still felt urgent and within reach. Fast forward to 2016, and those twins, now adults, grapple with the legacy their parents left behind. Hampton (Aaron James McKenzie), scarred by his service in Afghanistan, abandons his post and returns to Chicago’s South Side and to Lucia (Alysia Velez), his undocumented girlfriend who anchors him to a fragile sense of home. His brother Ernie (Jakiem Hart), once a prodigy on the guitar, has withdrawn from both his talent and the world—until Hampton’s unraveling forces him to confront the very past he’s been avoiding.

Broadnax directs with a ferocity that mirrors the play’s title, blending moments of tenderness and chaos with cinematic precision. He builds scenes that combust with tension and intimate ache, often within the same breath. The design work—gritty projections, steel scaffolding, and stark, rhythmic lighting—evokes both the bunker of a warehouse and the battlefield. There’s an immediacy here: revolution is not a metaphor, but a lived inheritance.

(L-R) Jakeim Hart and Aaron James McKenzie in Revolution(s).

Then there’s the music—pure Morello. The score, straight from the Rage Against the Machine playbook, fuses electric rebellion with spiritual yearning. Songs like “Battle Sirens,” “Hold the Line,” and “Whatever It Takes” roar as anthems of resistance, while “Rise to Power” and “Promenade” reveal unexpected warmth and vulnerability. The songs don’t so much advance the narrative as expand it, offering philosophical texture instead of plot propulsion. In Revolution(s), music is both protest and prayer—an act of survival.

What happens when the spirit of rebellion is passed down like trauma? What does it mean to inherit both resistance and loss? Revolution(s) suggests that revolution isn’t merely an act—it’s a legacy, coded into the body like memory or pain. Leon and Emma’s defiance becomes both a beacon and a burden for their sons, who carry the scars of a fight they didn’t choose but can’t escape. For Hampton, rebellion manifests as a restless need to confront authority—even when the war he’s fighting is within himself. For Ernie, it’s the refusal to participate, a quieter but no less radical protest against expectation. The play’s most haunting insight is that revolution reshapes generations; its victories inspire, but its wounds linger.

Dohrn’s writing captures this duality with compassion and fury, showing that to inherit rebellion is to inherit a question—how do you keep fighting without becoming consumed by the fire your parents lit?

Revolution(s) is a work of conviction—raw, restless, and unapologetically alive. It asks hard questions about legacy, freedom, and what we’re willing to sacrifice for change. In a cultural moment of complacency by our elected representatives, Revolution(s) doesn’t just remind us of what rebellion sounds like—it dares us to remember why it matters.

Highly Recommended

When: Through Nov. 16th
Where: Goodman Theater (170 N. Dearborn)
Tickets: $34-$104
Info: goodmantheatre.org

*This review is also shared on https://www.theatreinchicago.com/!