Steam Heat

By T.E.Kalem

ONE MO' TIME! Conceived and Directed by Vernel Bagneris

They may have to replace the roof of Manhattan's Village Gate Downstairs any night. A joyful noise is pounding at the rafters. A quartet of performers (three women and one man) are singing, dancing and strutting their flammable stuff, aided and abetted by an onstage jazz combo that is pistol hot.

Billed as "an evening of 1920s black vaudeville," the show is a kind of nostalgic tribute to black performers who toured the pre-Depression South on the T.O.B.A. (Theater Owners Booking Agency) circuit. Fortunately, there is precious little vaudeville in One Mo' Time!and no imitations of greats like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Sweet Mama Stringbean, who made their early fame on the circuit. The setting is New Orleans' Lyric Theater. A backstage dressing-room drama, replete with the trials and tribulations of show biz and some seething personal rivalries, constitutes the subplot picture frame for the evening.

It's what's up front that viscerally counts. There are sizzling renditions of the Charleston, the black bottom and the cakewalk; the band lashes into Tiger Rag and Muskrat Ramble, and when the whole company belts out A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, the mercury leaves the thermometer.

One could exhaust superlatives on individual numbers. When Sylvia ("Kuum-ba") Williams, a lady of formidable amplitude, undulates into Kitchen Man and The Right Key but the Wrong Keyhole, sex becomes an active verb. Thais Clark is an infectious comedian who can subtly saturate a blues like Muddy Water with haunting plaintiveness. By birth, Topsy Chapman was a 16th child. Here she's a No. 1 joymaker. Snake-hipped Vernel Bagneris keeps the company jumping at a blistering pace.

An added treat is the torrid trumpet work of Jabbo Smith. He has been playing since the '20s. Now over 70, he can garnish a mike with some slyly nimble scat singing, and his ''chops'' are still tops.

From one minute to the next, One Mo' Time! is a hot, wild, ribald and rousing delight.

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