By David Rabinovitz****When an austere publication of immense, world-wide cultural authority assigns a review of Smokey Joe’s Café – a jukebox musical, to Laura Collins-Hughes, whose twitter feed shows her to be deeply immersed in politically conscious experimental theatre, one wants to say, “What’s up with that?”
Her now notorious review, originally published in the New York Times on July 22, 2018, in which she attacked the show for being superficial was itself egregiously superficial and absurdly “ocularcentric” in its analysis. What I mean by ocularcentric is this: If you go to a Broadway show and come away from it humming the scenery and praising the costumes, you are being ocularcentric, focusing on the visual, rather than the auditory or any of the other senses.
Alysha Umphress, who was the collateral damage of Ms. Collins-Hughes ocularcentrism, needs no introduction to the readers of this publication. Ms. Umphress defended herself in a truly exemplary, fair-minded and nuanced response to Ms. Collins-Hughes, which should become a model of discourse on social media (I won’t hold my breath). Nor does Ms. Umphress need me to come to her rescue. I’ll only say that Ms. Collins-Ross might attribute the storm that she unnecessarily started to something that she herself has tweeted:
“I always wonder: where were the editors? One of the most important things they do is save us from ourselves.” June 15 Indeed !
It’s also the case that her musical responses bear a lot closer scrutiny than the costume that Ms. Umphress wore. Ms. Collins-Hughes confidently asserts that Smokey Joe’s Café fails to “do what a jukebox musical, or even (my emphasis) a great cabaret set ideally ought, to make you hear long familiar songs in a new way, remind you of beloved melodies that you’d forgotten and send you home roaring to take a deep dive into Spotify.”
I wonder how Ms. Collins–Hughes knows what other audience members took away from the show? How does she know that for some in the crowd, a glorious part of their youth wasn’t retrieved or re-invigorated in some way, or that younger audience members weren’t introduced to songs that they will come to love? Surely, the vast majority of attendees don’t and shouldn’t, go to jukebox musicals with their analytical antennae on high alert. How many people does she think even noticed what Alysha, one of the most gifted singers of her generation, was wearing?
Ms. Collins–Hughes archly allows that “For many a pleasant evening in the company of such tunes is probably enough.” For the many, I guess, but not for the enlightened few like a critic who sees so deeply into people’s hearts, as well as a costume designer’s alleged ineptitudes.
As for making you hear old songs in new ways, Ms. Collins-Hughes contradicts herself by saying that “Loving You,” the Elvis hit, was a gorgeously unadorned display of doo-wop harmonies, which it emphatically was, but forgetting, or not knowing, that Elvis’ back-up group, The Jordanaires, was not a doo-wop group at all, but an older-style vocal harmony group with significant stylistic differences from doo-wop. She thus undercuts her claim about interpretive diffidence for which I saw no warrant. Individuality was expressed within the idiomatic boundaries and traditions of the tunes. It’s not meant to be; outline the melody and then let it rip for 12 choruses of scat singing.
Ms. Collins-Hughes claims that the show was relentless and overly polished. Well that’s exactly what made Murray the K’s old rock ‘n’ roll shows, “Live from the Brooklyn Fox,” in the early ‘60s, great during the heyday of many of these tunes. That was long before rock ‘n’ roll shows became an object of knowing cerebrations in the New York Times.
I found her claim that the show doesn’t feel like a celebration, to be utterly without merit, simply because many of the numbers were done with such soul-wrenching brio, that they outdid the originals.
In one respect, at least, Ms. Collins-Hughes is absolutely right when she says, “Mind you, it likely doesn’t matter what a critic says about Smokey Joe’s Café.”
I fervently agree with that.
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