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‘After Midnight’ Pays Homage to The Majesty of 1920s Harlem

by Mark Dreisonstok

Falls Church News-Press

Signature Theatre’s “After Midnight” is a completely enthralling show with a brilliant cast. First performed off-Broadway, and later appearing as a hit 2013 Broadway musical, Arlington’s Signature is now streaming the show on demand. The show transports the viewer to a by-gone era — to a midnight in Harlem in 1932 when, as the show itself says, “Harlem’s heartbeat was a drumbeat,” according to the opening lines of the show. “With the drumbeat,” in echo of lines from poet Langston Hughes’ “Juke Box Love Song,” the show introduces the welcome presence of “Hamilton’s” Christopher Jackson. (Hughes’ poetry is heard throughout the show.) Rhythm is also seen by brilliant tap dancing in “Happy As the Day Is Long,” also in the arrangement of Duke Ellington (a native of Washington, D.C.).

The show, according to the playbill, seems to be “featuring 28 of the big band era’s most memorable songs, performed by a cast of 122 and a band of seven.” Yet some pieces would become standards, such as “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” sung engagingly by a female trio of Kanysha Williams, Jessica Bennet and Jennie Harney-Fleming in thirties period costumes. For another piece that would become a standard for many years, “I’ve Got the World on a String” features a blue balloon on a string, with fabulous blue lighting coordination lighting up the rear stage.

The production works especially well when the music is loyal to, yet a bit dissonant from, the 1930’s jazz sound, as in the Ellington stomp “Braggin’ in Brass” featuring Solomon Parker III and Sophia Adoum, the latter of whom slides down a slide as the trombone slides down in a number in which cacophony and visual acrobatics blend, a tribute to the choreographer and director. Likewise, the standard “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” boasts an impressive vocal by Nova Y. Payton with playful choreography, rendered with verisimilitude by the videographer (regrettably, the program does not make it clear which performer is performing which piece, and JULY 8 – 14, 2021 | PAGE 3

SHAYLA S. SIMMONS sings along to music from the by-gone era of Big Band

Jazz in “After Midnight.” (Photo: Christopher Mueller) DEWITT FLEMING JR. is just one of the dancers in the show, communicating human drama and the history of the Harlem Renaissance through music and

movement. (Photo: Christopher Mueller)

thus they are unnamed in this review.) “Stormy Weather,” associated with songstress Lena Horne, is stylized nicely here. While expressing her own style, she also keeps the essentials which make this such a memorable song. More Ellington pieces emerge with “The Mooche,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” showing both the ecstatic and pensive sides of Ellington as composer and arranger and the jazz artist’s mastery in writing vocal and instrumental music.

This carries with it a bit of a risk, as these are specific performances still fondly remembered today. Yet the elegance and polish of performers lovingly recreates the time period by putting the audience before the big bands — those that weren’t a part of the mainstram nightlife scene back in their day.

The show has reserved some of its best pieces for last with “On the Sunny Side of the Street” associated with trombonist Tommy Dorsey (and here sung energetically by Nova Y. Peyton) and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” tap-danced brilliantly by Philip Attmore and “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Cotton Club Stomp,” all immortalized by Duke Ellington and performed here by the full company.

The show reminds one of the Fats Waller tribute musical “Ain’t Misbehavin,’” but truly strikes out on its own with its Ellington emphasis and its ability to bring us back to an exciting, vibrant scene of long ago as no historic film or recording could. Yet the show succeeds beyond mere entertainment.

As the helpful Playbill notes: “’After Midnight’ is a celebration of the artists that came out of The Harlem Renaissance a century ago. It was a golden age of African American culture encompassing art. Poetry, literature, music, and so much more,” and this broad-spectrum which shows that it is not merely a musical cultural breakthrough is seen in photos of Poet Langston Hughes and writer and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston as well as a reproduction of the painting The Judgment Day by Aaron Douglas.

In a subtle way, the show expresses the totality of this movement through music. Special praise is due the direction and choreography of Jared Grimes and especially the music direction and piano solos by Mark G. Meadows. The show is highly recommended for its window into the jazz age of the past and, indeed, a broad exposure to the art of the Harlem Renaissance.

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LOCAL

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Large Number of Applicants Never Follow Up For Interviews

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It’s a similar situation for Stevie Houck, a partner in the new pizza franchise, Baddpizza.

The local chain with its Buffalo, New York-style pies has had its “Now Hiring” sign outside of its storefront in the Broaddale Shopping Center for weeks now — as have its corporate neighbors in the FedEx Office Print & Ship Center and Palm Beach Tan. Fortunately, college students have been able to fill some of the store’s part-time roles both in Falls Church, as well as its other branches in McLean and South Riding in Loudoun County.

Still, Houck said they’re looking for full-timers, particularly in management. He believes they can get through the summer with the staff they have now, though he’s also bracing for the uncertainty of what happens after school starts back up.

That’s on top of the struggle it’s been for the pizzeria to purchase wings (a case of wings jumped from $45 a year ago to $150 today, for example) to gain some name recognition around town. While there have been some spikes due to getting help from prideful Buffalo transplants in the Washington, D.C. area (as well as a remarkable NFL season from the Buffalo Bills), the ebbs and flows have been tough for the business that opened just weeks before the pandemic set in last March.

“It’s been very challenging. I know people say, ‘Well, you do pizza, you’ve got the best thing going.’ Yes, but only if you’re known,” Houck said. “Are you going to order from this place called ‘Baddpizza’ that you’ve never had before, or are you going to go for the sure thing, especially with the mentality of everyday people who go with what’s comfortable?”

Hiring challenges haven’t been consolidated to the food service industry alone, even though they are more pronounced there.

Gwynn Hegyi, the Chief Operating Officer at Body Dynamics, Inc., said that the physical therapy clinic is currently looking for additional intake coordinators, administrative staff, a massage therapist and an exercise scientist/ fitness trainer.

Changing priorities from the staff have been something the clinic has had to adapt to due to the pandemic. Hegyi said that many of its staff have cut back from full-time to part-time while they tend to personal matters — with a good chunk of them having to be home with young kids who were going through virtual school.

But that also meant that the full timers have been seeing more clients than they normally would, hence the need to hire more people. The unskilled positions such as being an intake coordinator and administrative staffer, on the other hand, have seen an unusual number of flakes.

“We’ve gotten more people responding to any ads that we might have been running or places that we might have been posting,” Hegyi said. “But when we follow back up and say, ‘Hey, can we do a phone interview? Can we schedule a time to talk?’ I don’t hear anything back.”

Her hypothesis: People are using the applications as proof that they are looking for jobs in order to qualify for unemployment, and then bailing on following through on interviews. Virginia is one of the 24 states that hasn’t ended the additional $300 a week of federal unemployment benefits which is set to expire on Sept. 6, according to USA Today.

Gary Henry, co-owner of Dominion Camera along West Broad, has inferred the same thing.

The five-decade-strong camera and photo development shop is currently looking to fill a sales associ-

ONE OF MANY ‘“NOW HIRING” signs outside of Ireland’s Four

Provinces. (Photo: News-Press)

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LOCAL

JULY 8 – 14, 2021 | PAGE 5

Current School Board Members Speak Out Against Claims Made in Op-Ed

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school officials not to be local in its origin given its “tone and voice.”

Members of the local School Board have listened to the threat posted in a voicemail. Police have been notified and Noonan has requested that the City provide security at its School Board meetings.

Shapiro, who is a national leader and vice president of the right-libertarian Cato Institute based in Washington, D.C., accuses the F.C. School Board of having “other priorities” in the face of pressures from some parents “about getting their kids back to in-person learning” in the commentary.

The F.C. Board, he claimed, “repeatedly deferred to the superintendent on pandemic policy and instead debated whether to change the names” of the two aforementioned schools.

He accused the board of being “oblivious to public sentiment” in the face of an unofficial poll which showed a majority of those asked wanting to keep the Mason and Jefferson names.

Still, he wrote, this “was the tip of the iceberg” in the face of what he called a “brewing discontent” among some parents about “the lack of school-board response on all sorts of concerns.” He claimed that “on pandemic response, we were always a step behind.” He accused Superintendent Noonan of “moving the goalposts” on the matter, and the school renamings “added insult to injury.”

Shapiro’s appeal to a national audience and general attack on the current board and administrative leadership fits the pattern identified by the New York Times as “a culture war brawl that has spilled into the country’s educational system” led by Republicans “at the state, local and national levels.”

A May article in the online Axios newsletter noted that “what was traditionally a nonpartisan, hyper-local role is now at the center of a swirling national political debate,” noting that “grassroots conservative groups are getting involved in school board races all across the country.”

But Shapiro’s placement of his local school board candidacy in such a context has not gone over so well in Falls Church thus far, especially his criticisms of what goes on here before a national stage.

Strongest in his comments in the past week has been longtime Falls Church City Councilman and former Mayor David Snyder, himself a Republican.

Snyder, whose statement is published in full elsewhere in this edition, wrote, “All voices need to be listened to, and I am committed to that. On the other hand, I must challenge negative, unfair and inaccurate stereotypes of our community and our citizens from all sides who adopt the ‘if it ain’t

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FALLS CHURCH SCHOOL BOARD candidate Ilya Shapiro, who authored the Wall Street Journal commentary. (Courtesy Photo)