STAGE REVIEW : An Exhilarating, Imperfect ‘Last Jam’

NEW YORK — So somebody finally got it right. After two other black musical revues opened on Broadway this month, “Jelly’s Last Jam” came to the Virginia on Sunday night with Gregory Hines in the title role and showed how a big-time revue is done. The show, based on the music of Jelly Roll Morton, has a huge, impeccable cast, exhilarating performances, elegantly understated sets and a witty, confident, often scathing, sense of style.

But all of the above, unfortunately, was not enough for its creators, who worked with intelligence--but far less success--to make more than just a wonderful plotless song-and-dance revue. The intention was also to make a strong, unsanitized biographical musical about Morton, an enormous talent but a bigot and egomaniac, a light-skinned Creole who felt superior to blacks and who claimed to believe he invented jazz.

The production’s success, then, depends on one’s ability to flow with the show and overlook the rest; there are massive jolts of encouragement along the way. Author-director George C. Wolfe, who burst on the scene in 1986 with his stereotype-shaking satire, “The Colored Museum,” plays bright and rough, from inside and out, with the ghosts and images of racism--with lots of uncompromising earthy talk and even a startling first-act finale, “Dr. Jazz,” with dancers in minstrel masks with white lips.

But when Wolfe gets back to telling Morton’s story, the psychology is pat, and the narrative--a “This Is Your Life” flashback from the cabaret gate to hell--is as contrived as that of most failed musical bios. For all the effort to do more than a revue, the plot doggedly remains a place to hang the songs and dances. We know we’re supposed to care about the man, to grasp some larger truth about the personal costs of hubris. Instead, one sits there thinking, here’s a guy hardly anyone knows--and now we know he was a bad guy.

If anyone could make want to spend a few hours with such a man, it has to be someone with Hines’ likability and edge. His producer-wife, Pamela Koslow, has been developing the show for him for at least a decade--a journey that has included several writers and a tryout, without him, in Los Angeles last year.

And, although Hines cannot make us forgive Jelly for his cruelty, he certainly compensates with exuberant and smart performing. So does the rest of this marvelous cast--including Savion Glover, 18, once Broadway’s “Tap Dance Kid,” as the young Morton, with whom Hines does several virtuosic challenge-tap improvisations as absolute equals. While Hines has the suavity and sleepy eyes of experience, Glover has an open vulnerability that, if he were used more, might have made Morton’s crash more touching than a personality disorder.

Instead, Wolfe concentrates on a morality-play overview, led by a Chimney Man (the underutilized Keith David), who starts the show by descending a tall ramp on a shaft of light--designed by that master of high-tech poetic minimalism, Robin Wagner.

Although Chimney Man describes himself to Morton as the “concierge of your soul,” he’s really a fancily dressed Ghost of Christmas Past. He accuses Jelly of being “messenger who believes the message is him,” who denies the “black soil” from which he “drinks from the vine of syncopation.”

The characters along the journey make you miss them when they leave the stage--and many demand special mention. Tonya Pinkins, as the woman among many who gets to Jelly, has a vocal range that starts low and seems to go on forever in “Play the Music for Me,” not to mention a playful sensuality that runs the bedroom scene.

Oddly enough, only about half of the songs are by Morton--including the comic “That’s the Way We Do Things in New Yawk” and “Lovin’ Is a Lowdown Blues.” Most others are by Luther Henderson, who was also the musical supervisor of that revue by which all others are measured, “Ain’t’ Misbehavin’.” Equally strange is the omission of most of Morton’s more famous songs and the failure to identify the source of several of the most irresistible ones.

Jelly Roll Morton may not have “invented” jazz, but he did refine the relationship between improvisation and composition, expand the its harmonic and rhythmic variety, and play a big part in the fusion of ragtime, blues, Creole delicacy and swing. He may have been a nasty man, but after seeing his music ignored during his life, he certainly wouldn’t like to see it overlooked now. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, to ignore his music in a musical about how it killed him to see his music ignored.