ATC Brings Blues to Tucson as Part of ’25 Desert Song Fest
By Cathalena E. Burch. Originally published on Tucson.com.
There’s a lyric in one of the final songs in Arizona Theatre Company‘s production of Blues in the Night that director Ricardo Khan said kinda fits where we are in America today: “I got a right to sing the blues.”
“I’m tempted to change it to ‘We got a right to sing the blues’ because that’s what we’re dealing with right now,” he said during a rehearsal break earlier this month, mentioning the California wildfires and the political divisions in the country. “And we’ve been here before. … In the midst of all of that, how do people stay human? How do we stay human?”
One way, Khan and his fellow ATC creatives — choreographer Hope Clarke and musical director/band leader William Foster McDaniel — say is through music.
That also is the underlying theme of Blues in the Night, which opens on Sunday, Jan. 26, at the Temple of Music and Art as part of the 2025 Tucson Desert Song Festival.
“It’s about us having the right to sing the blues, all of us, this whole world,” Khan said during a conference call with Clarke and McDaniel. “Maybe it’s our way of getting through the night.”
This is the first time Khan, Clarke and McDaniel have all worked together over their decades-long careers, although they have worked together individually, including with Khan’s seminal Tony Award-winning Crossroads Theatre Company. This also is the first time Clarke and McDaniel have done Blues in the Night; Khan directed a production in Los Angeles a few years ago.
Blues in the Night celebrates the blues and its connection to the African-American experience. The musical revue, conceived by acclaimed TV and theater director Sheldon Epps, is set in a ramshackle Chicago hotel in 1938 and tells the stories of three women and their relationships with the same man.
Khan said the story takes place on the other side of the 1930s African-American migration from the South to industrialized cities around the country as people sought better economic opportunities and an escape from the retribution arising from the Jim Crow segregation laws.
The story is told in musical vignettes through 26 iconic torch songs made famous by blues and jazz legends including Bessie Smith, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Ida Cox and Benny Goodman.
“There’s a lot of blues songs in the show, but what the title doesn’t mention is the fact that there are also some pop or popular songs from that era … as well,” said McDaniel, a classically trained pianist and composer who has an extensive theater resume including serving as associate conductor for Ain’t Misbehavin on Broadway and musical director of the national tour in 1995.
McDaniel will play piano in the five-piece ensemble that will include a local trumpeter, saxophonist and bass player, and a drummer coming from Los Angeles.
Tony Award-nominated choreographer Clarke, who made history with Houston Grand Opera in 1995 as the first African-American to direct a production of Porgy and Bess for a major opera house, is taking inspiration from popular 1930s dances including the Lindy Hop to the Charleston and the Jitterbug and creating wholly new movement.
“I’m making it up,” she said with a chuckle. “We’re lucky, very lucky, to have singers who can move, thank you Jesus, because you know, it can be difficult working with singers. … But these ladies are wonderful. This is a wonderful cast. They just get in there and they do the work, and that’s it, and they kind of get it.”
Khan said Blues in the Night invites audiences into the musical and dance history of Black America “at a time when we need to sing the blues and we need to dance.”
“We really are in a transitionary time, not just as people, but as a world,” he added. “And it’s just wonderful to be able to latch onto one particular time when we just are able to visit four characters and an incredible band of musicians.”