★★★
“Whoopi Goldberg has been a pop culture fixture for so long that few may remember how and when she first rose to national fame,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. But the five esteemed actresses starring in the current off-Broadway revival of Goldberg’s 1984 multicharacter, one-woman show surely remember. In this reverent restaging, “what’s inevitably lost is the excitement of watching a single performer act the chameleon.” What’s gained, however, is “the warm camaraderie of an ensemble work,” and the shared sense of purpose among the performers who divide up Goldberg’s monologues: All are here to honor a game-changing writer and performer.
With no Whoopi onstage, “you more clearly appreciate her work as a playwright,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. The show opens with Kara Young playing a junkie philosopher named Fontaine, and the two-time Tony winner so quickly makes the role her own that you know that the night will yield fresh pleasures. Dominique Fishback gets the show’s “masterpiece,” about a Black girl who wishes to be blond. Jurnee Smollett, replacing Kerry Washington, plays the teenage surfer girl who’s coping with an unwanted pregnancy. In the final monologue, which Goldberg added in 2004, Kecia Lewis is as solid as her co-stars. Unfortunately, “the relentless sharpness” of the 1984 material goes missing.
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The entire show is “markedly shinier” than the original staging, said Brittani Samuel in The New York Times. In addition to the larger cast, which also includes Danielle Pinnock as a Jamaican immigrant caring for a dirty old white man, there’s a more lavish set, projections, and even a brief group dance. “But the styling feels like an appropriate nod to the celebratory mission of this production.” It also “reinforces the show’s most prevalent sensibility: that an entire generation of actors has been inspired by Goldberg’s work.”
