“WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME” AND “MJ: THE MUSICAL” ASK AUDIENCES TO RECONSIDER THEIR SUBJECTS THROUGH THE LENS OF TIME AND NOSTALGIA.
REVIEW: “What the Constitution Means to Me” at Circuit Playhouse through Oct. 6.
Audience members entering Circuit Playhouse through Oct. 6 are handed two valuable pieces of literature at the door. One is a program informing us that the evening’s production stars two of Memphis’ most competent and engaging local actors, Kim Justis and Michael Gravois.
The second is a pocket-sized copy of the United States Constitution, the kind every politician in Washington produces magician-like from their sleeves when claiming immunity from reproach.
The contents of the latter document (unlike the actors in the first) are NOT getting good reviews lately. Since the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, the Opinion pages have made a pastime of constitutional critique. It’s “broken,” declares Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, law professors at Harvard and Yale respectively, in a 2022 editorial highlighting the Constitution’s more problematic features — the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, in particular — as roadblocks to true democracy so long as the minority party maintains geographic control of certain areas of the country.
Another flaw: it’s nearly impossible to modernize or amend. This affords so-called court Originalists the power to radically reinterpret the founders’ words in ways that conveniently support whatever ruling is sought by our politicized judiciary. After legal scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt co-authored “How Democracies Die” in 2018 as a warning to Americans watching the Supreme Court overturn longstanding precedents in the name of Originalism, they became so alarmed by the speed with which their predictions came to pass that in 2022, they delivered a follow-up, “Tyranny of the Minority,” to emphasize how close the Jan. 6 insurrection came to reversing the Spirit of 1776 with a single riot.
Had our Vice President been JD Vance (who claims he would not have certified the election) and the Supreme Court nullified Washington D.C. gun restrictions as they have elsewhere — we might now be living under a one-party dictatorship.
“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” Levitsky told the New York Times.
Trump himself, though the primary beneficiary of the Constitution’s bugs, is also a critic. It does not, he says, give him enough latitude to self-declare the presidency and bypass the legislature in order to enact his “concepts” of plans. He promotes ignoring it — or parts of it — in the future.
Proponents of American democracy find this bleak situation to be a stark contrast to what we, as children, once were taught about the strength of the Constitution. In our government classes, it was laid before us as mankind’s most important legal document since the Magna Carta.
Heidi Schreck was one of those awe-inspired kids. She, like many others (including this reviewer) took part in a longstanding public speaking competition organized by the American Legion to foster patriotic appreciation for our founding document. As a 15-year-old, the future actress and playwright could regale a hall full of veterans with the history and necessity of each Amendment, knowing that her judges would expect nothing less than fervid admiration.
Her sincere and adulatory recollections of participating in this contest form the genesis of her play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which premiered in 2017, shortly after the man who confessed a habit of groping women was elected President, with nearly 3 million fewer votes that his Democratic opponent.
As a grown-up, she began picking apart the loopholes and vague language that had turned her devotion into an “It’s Complicated” relationship. Adding to this, the ethically dubious actions of Trump, Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and a radicalized Supreme Court had her worried.
In Circuit Playhouse’s timely new staging, actress Kim Justis portrays the playwright herself. Schreck’s surprisingly funny and entertaining script made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Like Schreck, Justis brings warmth and charisma, working the room like a stand up comic while fulfilling the multiple duties of the script — part TED Talk, part autobiography and part call-to-action. Despite fitting in one’s breast pocket, the Constitution is a heavy read. So she zeroes in on one important Amendment — the 14th — first as interpreted by her 15-year-old self paying homage to its revolutionary impact at the end of the Civil War and later as an adult, re-examining a personal crisis that planted seeds of doubt in the Constitution’s ability to view her as a truly equal citizen.
In some ways, the play is already due for an update. Justis channels the Schreck of 2017 with a fighting sense of hopefulness and vigor that we, the audience, may find overly optimistic in the wake of 2022’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe V. Wade. The irony sits with us as she notes the powerful protective forcefield of the Ninth Amendment, giving us rights not necessarily enumerated: “Just because its not in the Constitution doesn’t mean you don’t have that right.” Women’s bodies, she says, had been entirely left out of the original document. The Ninth tacitly acknowledges them. (And yet…)
She describes how a series of precedents led the courts (with little help from congress) to grant single women access to birth control starting in 1972 and the right to abortion the following year. The 14th Amendment would factor into the Marriage Equality decision in 2015.
It should be obvious at this juncture that the rationale used by six Supreme Court justices to let state governments decide whether or not women have the same right to privacy as men could — and perhaps will — be the precedent that helps them overturn marriage equality. (Tennessee, we note ruefully, is pressing ahead to achieve this aim.)
Actor Michael Gravois adds personal context to this looming possibility in an emotional and poetic monologue. He breaks character as the American Legion’s moderator to relate his own story about growing up different from the other males in his family. And on Friday’s opening, when he acknowledged his husband of many years in the audience, we were, for a moment at least, reminded of how — in the face of the minority’s stranglehold over who’s afforded basic human rights and who isn’t — the Constitution sometimes comes through.
The show ends with some crowd participation. A random audience member (so we’re told) is selected to choose the winner of a parliamentary debate between Justis (now playing herself) and a local high school student — on Friday it was the earnest and confident Caitlyn Jones, a 10th grader at Hutchinson School.
The first time I heard the debate topic proposed in the Broadway production — Should the Constitution Be Abolished? — I assumed the outcome a forgone conclusion. Even in the midst of the first Trump presidency, audiences seemed to possess enough confidence in our democracy to end the show on a patriotic note.
At Circuit, I shrank in my seat when the actors scanned the audience to pick a judge. A younger person was chosen. On one hand, her decision gave me a glimmer of hope that the next generation might be able to claw back some rights lost to an originalist court. On the other, I was relieved not to have been a Debbie Downer; the first half of this review might give some indication of what the Constitution means to me.
REVIEW: “MJ: The Musical” at the Orpheum Theatre through Sept. 22
In December of 1983, every child in my neighborhood spent winter break waiting for MTV to broadcast what would later become one of the greatest music videos of all time — a 13-minute homage to B-movies. When, finally, one of us captured it on VHS tape, we studied it harder than any class assignment ever given to 20th Century schoolchildren.
It’s a shame (or possibly a great blessing) there were no iPhones. The ’80s most viral dance routine — a zombie shuffle — continued on for months in backyards. We knew by heart the entire Vincent Price rap at the end: “Darkness falls across the land… the midnight hour is close at hand…”
There’s damn good reason Michael Jackson’s 1982 hit record stands — and will likely stand forever — as the best selling album of all time. Sorry, Taylor. Sorry, Beyonce. In terms of sales, “NO MERE MORTAL CAN RESIST THE EVIL OF THE THRILLER! AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
Given Jackson’s impact on the world of popular music and culture — as Elvis Presley before him — it was only a matter of time before a jukebox musical was assembled in his loving memory. But like Elvis, time — and unseemly revelations — have chipped away at the gilded busts of these icons in the Hall of Fame.
“MJ: The Musical” arrives at the Orpheum the same week a criminal indictment of rapper Sean Combs reminds us that talent and success are no excuse for unsavory behavior. It strains the conscience to set aside the more problematic parts of Jackson’s history, like allegations of child abuse that emerged in 1993. Though acquitted of molestation in 2005, Jackson never quite made the case for fans that sleepovers with minors are acceptable when you’re rich and have a childlike personality.
I’m not convinced that time has ameliorated our troubled relationship with Michael Jackson. But solving that problem is not the aim of “MJ: The Musical,” which gives the audience a hall pass, of sorts, to skip those later years and revisit the performer at the zenith of his career.
Notably, the storyline’s biography covers everything up to 1992, when we find Jackson and his team preparing his “Dangerous” World Tour. Time and money is running out. Jackson’s quest for perfection, along with probing from a reporter from MTV, jogs memories of his troubled childhood in a musical family under its dictatorial and occasionally abusive patriarch, Joseph Jackson.
In flashbacks, we see young Michael (an amazing Josiah Benson) emanating talent from every lanky sinew. Here, all the hits of the Jackson 5 are revisited, along with that perfectly synched choreography and those fabulous ’70s costumes. A late-teen, young-adult Michael (another outstanding performer, Erik Hamilton) shows the singer coming into his own and asserting his artistic vision as others try to put him into convenient industry boxes. As Jackson adapts a range of music and dance influences into a new, singular style, the show underscores his genius as an O.G. Content Creator.
The thoughtful script by playwright Lynn Nottage weaves in themes of racial identity, self-discovery and finding one’s voice, while also linking one hit song after another. It succeeds at humanizing a man who spent the 1980s making headlines for his eccentricities. In some ways, revisiting the Jackson myth and legend — buying the Beatles music catalog, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, changing his complexion, trying to acquire the Elephant Man’s skeleton — is the nostalgia trip we need. Jackson’s music often took aim at the media circus that surrounded him. One of his most memorable music videos, “Leave Me Alone,” shows him on a carnival ride that is his life. The song didn’t make the musical, but some scenic elements on the stage allude to it.
The set is great, by the way, transitioning between past and present — practical and metaphorical — with the energy and lighting of a fast-paced rock concert.
For a few decades there, Michael Jackson impersonators — like Elvis — were prolific. But finding one today who resembles him, talks like him, sings like him and who can also carry a show dramatically was likely the biggest concern of this whole project.
From the moment Jamaal Fields-Green takes the stage, all eyes lock on this incredible performer. His physicality is riveting. One of the hardest decisions you will make all night is whether to watch his eyes or his feet. Both are equally intense.
Jukebox musicals often struggle to shoehorn famous songs into a biographical arc, some more awkwardly than others. Last season’s Tina Turner musical, for example, had to include one of her biggest hits — the theme from “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” (another ’80s classic). The lyrics, with its images of children leading the way to freedom in a dystopian world, helped reconcile the grown-up Tina with the child she once was.
The 11 o’clock number in “MJ: The Musical” (or 9:30, now that Orpheum shows start at 7:30) is “Thriller,” of course. It serves the exact same purpose. And yet, this reconciliation is more effective, I think, because Michael is already such a childlike character. Through horror movies, children learn how to confront their fears and manage anxieties. When Fields-Green begins to sing, softly, “It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark…” he beautifully ties the lyric to Michael’s fraught relationship with his father, and the fears every artist faces with the prospect of failure.
When the beat kicks in and the dancers take the stage, the psychological demons transform into the dazzling production number that would inspire future generations of artists (and raise the bar for music videos from limbo to pole vault). For all my reservations going into the show, I left “MJ: The Musical” with a renewed appreciation for that, at least: art’s power to make a roomful of people feel like we’re all kids again. ✒ C.B.