A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical

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Bracketed by gigantic stacks of cabin trunks, the stage for A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical aptly foreshadows the show’s peripatetic restlessness, as it chronicles the legendary jazz trumpeter’s life from the 1910s to the 1970s in four different cities, with each locale accompanied by a spousal change. It’s a lot of historical and emotional ground to cover, which Aurin Squire’s book dutifully, if cursorily, accomplishes while being hamstrung by the usual jukebox-musical problem: shoehorning the story between the hits. Though musicians Alphonso Horne and Bruce Harris expertly handle the production’s astounding trumpet playing, Tony Award-winner James Monroe Iglehart as Armstrong is its gravel-voiced center, capable of making an eyes-shut listener believe in reincarnation. But, impressive as that is, it wasn’t the assignment.

Great in entirely predictable ways, especially its rich musical orchestrations and arrangements from jazz genius Branford Marsalis (he’s assisted by Tony Award- winner Daryl Waters), A Wonderful World wastes its decided advantages by keeping Armstrong at a distance while incongruously tasking him with narrating his own life. An impassive witness to himself, Armstrong is also a bizarrely unreflective one as he meanders from place to place and wife to wife, before finally appearing with his wronged women to sing “What a Wonderful World” as an ethereal eleven o’clock number on Adam Koch and Steven Royal’s protean set. To say the least, it’s a lackluster concluding statement on the complexities of Armstrong’s marriages, as well as his feelings about a world that, despite all of its “trees of green” and “red roses too,” caused him so much pain.

The multiple co-conceivers (Christopher Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine) and co-directors (Renshaw, Christina Sajous, and Iglehart) of A Wonderful World apparently agree that Armstrong was a brilliant musician, a serially bad husband, and buried relentless racist humiliation beneath that insincerely beaming smile, but these not-so-hot takes are, frankly, the kind of surface knowledge anyone attending a musical about Armstrong probably possesses when entering the theater. Packed with 30 songs, either sung fully or in part, A Wonderful World does offer a fairly sweeping sense of Armstrong’s creative journey, from blowing a bluesy cornet in his hometown of New Orleans, to taking up a swinging trumpet in Chicago for King Joe Oliver’s band, to surviving the Great Depression as an oft degraded film star in Hollywood, to becoming an ambivalent icon in New York from the 1940s until his death in 1971. Of course, that’s an excessive amount of ingredients for a single musical, suggesting the show’s many skillful bakers couldn’t come to a consensus on which ones to leave out.

Still, what really continuously deflates A Wonderful World is the tiresome pattern of Armstrong’s romantic relationships, as they rise and fall in rhythmic accordance with the Armstrong songbook. New Orleans wife Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a switchblade-wielding prostitute who, if nothing else, thoroughly excites the young Armstrong, gets “Kiss of Fire” for the good times, while the next wife in line, Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), a talented Chicago jazz pianist who helped Armstrong recognize his marquee value, swoons to “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” At the end of Act I, both women’s hearts simultaneously break to a touching combo of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.” Then, following the intermission, Hollywood wife, Alpha Smith (Kim Exum), a coquettish gold digger, plainly expresses her intentions in “Big Butter and Egg Man” before quickly heading out the door to the tune of “Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears.” Lasting by far the longest in marriage to Armstrong, New York wife and trailblazing Cotton Club performer Lucille Wilson (Darlesia Cearcy), sticks around until widowhood, despite Armstrong’s prodigious philandering. That’s why, for Wilson, “Cheek to Cheek” eventually curdles into a defiantly sung “That’s My Home.”

When wounded, these female voices send shivers through the audience, but Iglehart’s Armstrong regards them as if they’re singing about someone else. For whatever reason, Armstrong only becomes somewhat three-dimensional in the company of men, including his suspect manager Joe Glaser (Jimmy Smagula) and fellow black artists, the wily-turned-tragic King Joe Oliver (Gavin Gregory) and  Lincoln Perry (DeWitt Fleming Jr.), better known professionally as Stepin Fetchit. Ironically, a breathtaking tap-dance duet with the latter, choreographed by Rickey Tripp to a biting rendition of “When You’re Smiling,” is the closest we ever get to a deeper understanding of Armstrong as he and Perry mutually acknowledge the brutally ingratiating price they’re expected to pay for unsteady fame and fortune.

But A Wonderful World doesn’t dwell too long on this mental toll or any other aspect of Armstrong’s inner life, preferring instead to, as hastily as possible, always leave behind the lows for the highs. Mostly, that’s narratively unsatisfying, but this tendency becomes absolutely jarring after Armstrong openly supports the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus forcefully barred, in 1957, from integrating a public high school. Federal intervention to protect the students’ civil rights came slowly, causing Armstrong to castigate President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s a stirring stand that derailed Armstrong’s career until the enormous success of “Hello, Dolly” fully brought him back to prominence. Biographically, the song’s inclusion is unavoidable, but it didn’t need to be performed as a sing-along with the houselights up, as if the audience had not been already entertained and sheltered enough.

A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical (open run)

Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 833-274-8497 or visit http://www.louisarmstrongmusical.com

Running time: two hours and 35 minutes including one intermission