Triple Threat

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: JELLY'S LAST JAM

AUTHOR: MUSIC BY JELLY ROLL MORTON; LYRICS BY SUSAN BIRKENHEAD; BOOK BY GEORGE C. WOLFE

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Dancer-singer-actor Gregory Hines redeems a muddled attempt to liberate the black musical.

The phrase "black musical" usually means either a gospel rafter-rattler or a nightclub evening of raunch and funk, typically highlighted by frenzied tap dancers and some enormous female singer with a voice like a howitzer. There have been exceptions that accorded blacks roles of dignity and depth (the richest emotionally, Dreamgirls, ironically was crafted by whites). But the norm is jumping and jiving, as in the new Five Guys Named Moe and the amiable gumbo of jubilant New Orleans sounds The High Rollers.

Playwright George C. Wolfe, best known for his unsparing satire in The Colored Museum, plainly has grander ambitions in mind for Jelly's Last Jam, a biography of composer and performer Jelly Roll Morton. The show is as much a review of Morton's racial politics and ethnic fealty as of his musical contribution as the asserted "inventor of jazz." The central plot point is that Morton was of mixed-race Creole ancestry and prided himself on his relative whiteness, even while immersing himself in, and transforming, black music. The show's theme is that neither he nor any black composer can truly claim to be a creator; they are sounding boards in which a heritage reverberates. These are provocative notions, but they are inadequately explored. As his own director, Wolfe indulges a taste for old-fashioned, tacky production numbers that outshout the ideas.

The show takes a long time getting started, ends rather abruptly, and is needlessly vulgar along the way, including a prolonged bout of simulated sexual intercourse at center stage. Some of the stage effects bring unintended laughter from the audience, as does much of the pseudospiritual dialogue for Keith David, in an impossible role mingling elements of Death, Satan and St. Peter. And Morton himself remains a sketchy figure whose few bits of trademark bad behavior are repeated over and over.

Yet if Jelly's Last Jam fails as dramaturgy, it succeeds much of the time as bouncy entertainment, thanks to four people. Mary Bond Davis is a first-rate upholstered mama. Tonya Pinkins is sultry, sharp-tongued and sweet-voiced as Morton's love interest. Savion Glover, 18, outdoes his own brilliant best in tap-dancing the role of the young Jelly. And as the mature Jelly, Gregory Hines vibrates with the kind of glorious triple-threat talent -- as singer, dancer and actor -- that Broadway used to revel in but hardly ever witnesses anymore.