On his Bronzeville cultural excursions that lead past the standard tracks, tour information and historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas sometimes pulls up his Chicago Mahogany Excursions bus outdoors a townhouse at 421 E. forty fourth St.
“This can be a personal residence now,” he advised one latest group, as everybody peered throughout the road, “however it was additionally the house of Louis Armstrong.”
Louis Daniel Armstrong, variously nicknamed “Satchmo,” “Satch,” and “Pops,” has been useless for greater than 50 years and he lived in Bronzeville for under about seven years earlier than decamping for the coasts. However that interval in a booming toddlin’ city within the Twenties was a vastly productive one for the trumpet participant, vocalist and, ultimately, international movie star.
Armstrong performed in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band within the Lincoln Gardens at 459 E. thirty first St. He made his first studio recordings with Oliver in Richmond, Indiana. And Armstrong met and married his second spouse, the pianist and bandleader Lil Hardin, who famously promised to “take the nation out of him,” and, by all accounts, was profitable in doing so. Together with Chicago.
Armstrong’s years in Chicago additionally explains the presence this week in a Randolph Road espresso store of James Monroe Iglehart, a a lot beloved Broadway star finest recognized for his Tony Award-winning efficiency because the Genie within the authentic 2014 Broadway manufacturing of Disney’s “Aladdin,” a tour de pressure piece of performing that someway managed to pay homage to Robin Williams’ vocal efficiency within the animated film whereas physicalizing it totally as his personal.
Like the person he’s right here to have a good time, Iglehart was recent in Wednesday from New Orleans, able to play Satchmo within the new musical “A Great World,” which opens Friday at Broadway in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre in a manufacturing with Broadway in its sights.
The present first carried out in New Orleans, the Jazz cradle the place Armstrong was born and raised. “They had been simply so glad there to have us round and taking part in,” Iglehart says, having barely had time to place down his luggage and look out the window onto Randolph Road.
“These are the cities which are essential to Louis Armstrong,” he says, staring on the sidewalk as folks stroll by. “And I do know loads of Broadway exhibits come via right here first.”
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In essence, “Great World” is a biographical musical however with an uncommon construction shaped from the topic’s quite a few marriages. “We inform the Louis Armstrong story via every of his 4 wives,” Iglehart says. “He took a very long time to grasp himself. And he had a wandering eye.”
Famously so. Satchmo is credited, if that’s the phrase, with having had lots of of affairs. By way of marriages, he was tied to Daisy Parker (”He met her at 17,” Iglehart says, “and who is aware of something about marriage at that age?”), Hardin, Alpha Smith after which Lucille Wilson, his most profitable pairing. As Iglehart tells it, the present makes use of these wives to explain 4 very totally different phases of Armstrong’s life, from youthful lack of self-knowledge via energy struggles and artistic explorations with sturdy, inventive girls to an eventual discovery of a loving soul mate. (Within the guidelines of jukebox Broadway musicals about male stars, final marriages have a tendency to come back off finest.)
The present encompasses a reside, onstage orchestra. (Iglehart performs reside just a little but additionally has a trumpeting dubber on the stage.) It additionally stars Ta’Rea Campbell as Wilson, Jennie Harney-Fleming as Hardin, Brennyn Lark as Smith, and Khalifa White as Parker. The piece, conceived and directed by Christopher Renshaw, incorporates lots of Armstrong’s greatest hits, together with the long-lasting “Great World” and “On the Sunny Facet of the Road.” (”Good day Dolly,” additionally famously related to Armstrong, will not be there, but at the least, as a consequence of rights points being because it comes from a separate Broadway present.) However given the size of Armstrong’s profession, there isn’t a scarcity of fabric.
Iglehart, although, additionally says that Armstrong’s relationship to racial points is also on the desk right here; Armstrong, after all, was seen by some as overly obsequious to the racist leisure tradition that pervaded many of the period of his success. “I feel if you noticed him standing subsequent to Danny Kaye or Bing Crosby, he was in some ways taking part in a personality,” Iglehart says, “which is acquainted to me as an African American performer. There have been some moments in his life when America lastly did uncover that Louis Armstrong was, in actual fact, Black. And though he was criticized in the course of the civil rights motion, he did assist the motion. He simply did it his personal method.”
“Great World” is produced by Thomas E. Rodgers, Jr., Renee Rodgers, Andrew Delaplaine, Liz Curtis, and Martian Leisure (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), and just lately added Vanessa Williams to its crew of producers.
In a phone interview, Williams stated that she had been very creatively concerned with the manufacturing and that she meant to be within the theater in Chicago on opening night time. “I like diving into the script,” she stated. “It’s been improbable to have the ability to have a voice and see my concepts and ideas come to life.” Williams’ hands-on presence additionally has helped convey others into the undertaking, together with Wynton Marsalis, usually considered one of many key keepers of the Armstrong inventive flame.
Williams additionally stated that “Great World,” which has origins in a separate Miami manufacturing with a unique forged, now could be searching for the precise Broadway theater, competing with a number of different new musicals for the restricted stock of Broadway homes.
That trajectory is sophisticated by Iglehart additionally going into the approaching Broadway revival of “Spamalot” as King Arthur (he stated he has a frantic schedule at current, performing in a single present and rehearsing one other), however it feels like one doable consequence right here is that “Great World” will bow within the 2024-25 Broadway season with Iglehart then returning to the present.
“I’ve put loads of work into Louis Armstrong,” Iglehart stated, grinning like Satchmo. “I’d like to come back again to him.”
“A Great World” performs via Oct. 29 at Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; 800-775-2000 and www.broadwayinchicago.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
