AUGUST WILSON’S MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

My mind may have wandered during the second half of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but when all is said and done, it’s a pretty darn spectacular season opener for A Noise Within.

For one, it’s got Amber Liekhus sizzling like nobody’s business and singing up a storm as “Mother of the Blues” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the only real-life character ever to figure prominently in an August Wilson play and stop the show with a brassily belted, double entendre-packed “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to boot.

For another, its first half-hour or so features the kind of comedic workplace banter that has made Wilson’s Jitney one of the most popular of his much-awarded Century Cycle of plays.

Bantering like nobody’s business are pragmatic, straightlaced band leader/trombonist Cutler (Kai A. Ealy), philosophizing piano player Toledo (Gerald C. Rivers), easygoing bassist Slow Drag (Alex Morris), and trumpet-playing loose cannon Levee (Jamar Gilbert), that is until clashes stemming from generational ideology, divergent musical tastes, and unresolved personal trauma take us into considerably darker territory.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom benefits too from having director Gregg T. Daniel back to direct his seventh Wilson classic, once again demonstrating that there’s no one better at bringing August to vibrant, highly theatrical life than Daniel, case in point the surreal prologue he has added that has Ma’s girl toy Dussie Mae (CJ Obilom) possessed by some sort of demon when she attempts in vain to open her mouth in song.

 And for someone like this reviewer whose favorite phrase in the English language may be “ninety minutes no intermission,” Ma Rainey’s 2-hour-30-minute running time is a welcome half hour shorter than most Wilson plays I’ve seen.

Also on the plus side, once we’ve gotten past the series of long, uninterrupted monologs (like Toledo’s on Black people being “leftovers” and Slow Drag’s Faustian Eliza Cotter story) that Wilson fans find exhilarating but I personally find exhausting, Act Two brings Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom back to gripping life as the consequences of the previous act’s monologs, philosophizing, and debates come to a head and Ma Rainey gets to sing her heart out, Ma’s sweetheart of a nephew Sylvester (Francis C, Edemobi) gets to do his darnedest to overcome his stutter, and white music industry executives Irvin (Bert Emmett) and Sturdyvant (Matt Foyer) get to behave like assholes.

Not only that, but we get plenty of physical action to boot (courtesy of fight choreographer Ken Merckx Jr.,) and a grand finale so shocking and devastating, audiences will be left shaken to their very cores.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is gorgeous to look at too thanks to scenic designer Tesshi Nakagawa, costume designer Christine Cover Ferro, and lighting designer Ken Booth, and so believable are Ealy, Gilbert, Morris, and Rivers as Ma Rainey’s musicians that you might be astonished to learn that they’re actually “sidelining” (think instrumental lip-syncing) the pre-recorded performances of studio musicians Vikram Devesthali, Matt Rubin, Michael Saucier, and music director Byron Smith, magic made in tandem with sound designer extraordinaire Jeff Gardner.

Perhaps most importantly of all, A Noise Within has jam-packed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with some of the finest actors in town beginning with local legends Rivers and Morris, the former in an astonishing switch from the “Shiver me timbers” Long John Silver he’s been playing at Theatricum Botanicum to the literate, cerebral Toledo, and the latter once again utterly watchable as the easygoing, unflappable Slow Drag.

Ealy is terrific too as Cutler, who’s learned that playing by the rules is the way to survive in a Jim Crow world, Obilom is sultry as all get-out as Dussie Mae, Edemobi is sweetness personified as Sylvester, and Emmett, Foyer, and James Nardini (Policeman) make the most of the largely one-dimensional roles Wilson has given them.

Most memorable of all are the always dazzling Liekhus, whose transformation into the fiercely independent and unapologetically sensual Ma Rainey is downright sensational, and A Noise Within first-timer Gilbert, absolutely compelling as the arrogant, self-sabotaging, ticking timebomb that is Levee.

Finally, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom benefits enormously from the contributions of choreographer Joyce Guy, wig and makeup designer Shelia Dorn, properties designer Stephen Taylor, assistant scenic designer and charge artist Angelene Storey, dialect coach Andrea Odinov, and dramaturg Miranda Johnson-Haddad.

Sami Hansen is stage manager and Bryan Tiglio is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Alison Rodriguez. Kameron J. Brown, Khalif J. Gillett, Gwendolyn McCann-Mulamba, Merckx, KJ Powell, John Shartzer, and Sierra Nicolette Smith are understudies.

 I may not go wild when August Wilson’s characters start soliloquizing, as I know they will, or when things get supernatural (as thank goodness they don’t in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), but there’s no one who has chronicled the African American experience over the course of a century like this Poet of Black America.

Unique amongst his prodigious oeuvre for its biographical subject matter and for the opportunity it gives a blues diva to give it all she’s got, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom may have lost me there for a while mid-play, but once I was back on board, I remained riveted all the way up to its gut punch of a blackout.

A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd, Pasadena. Through September 20. Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30. Saturdays at 2:00 and 7:30, and Sundays at 2:00
www.ANoiseWithin.org

–Steven Stanley
August 30, 2026
Photos: Craig Schwartz

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

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