Theater Review—

A Thin Thread Holds An Enjoyable ‘Ella’ Together

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — A couple of years ago, Long Wharf did a one woman show about the singer Billie Holiday, in which audiences were made to feel that they were spending an evening listening to her perform and talk at her favorite Harlem club.

Now they are doing a similar production dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald.

With Ella, which continues just until October 17, the premise is that Ella has just returned to Nice, France, after a week in New York, where she attended the funeral of her beloved sister. The first act involves Ella arguing with her producer, over whether she is ready to perform, and whether she is willing to chat with the audience, letting them see a little more of her personal side.

The second act is the performance itself. She changes from a black traveling outfit to a blue evening gown. The four band members put on suits and ties.  And Ella lets her private emotions show.

Is this a play? Well, it’s really more like going to a concert, to see an imitation of the real things. There are many shows that do this. Beatlemania is one that comes to mind. Similarly The Buddy Holly Story and Always, Loretta Lynn, although those two have more in the way of back story and plot.

As it happens, Ella is brimming with real talent. Tina Fabrique, who has performed the role of Ella in numerous venues including its original production at TheaterWorks Hartford, has an amazing voice, not merely because it is so reminiscent of Fitzgerald herself, but rather because it’s really really powerful and rich and mesmerizing.

Her backing quartet of George Caldwell, Rodney Harper, Ron Haynes and Cliff Kellam are equally fine jazz musicians in their own right. So as a concert, this is definitely a treat. The audience was swept away with all those grand old numbers, from “A Tisket A Tasket,” “That Old Black Magic,” “The Nearness of You” and “Night and Day” to “How High the Moon,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me, “Lullaby of Birdland,”  “The Man I Love,” and more.

Making it into a play was a little more contrived. Ella Fitzgerald had a very difficult early life. She was illegitimate. Her mother died when she was 15, after which she was  sexually abused by her stepfather. She was arrested for working as a lookout for a bordello and for running numbers, and sent first to an orphanage, and then to a reform school in upstate New York.

But she escaped and made her way back to New York where she entered a talent contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, won first prize, was offered a job singing with Chick Webb’s band, and after that, she never faltered.

But colorful and dramatic as her early tribulations were, Ella Fitzgerald was an intensely shy and private person who did not publicize her antics in the way that many other pop stars did. She was not an addict like Lady Day, nor a self-indulgent swinger like Sinatra or Elvis. Her personality was concentrated on her presence as a performer.

While the racial prejudices of her lifetime made it difficult for her to become a star in the movies, or to achieve high social status, her talent was so great that she was recognized as the first lady of song in America. Whether she sang scat or bebop or Gilbert and Sullivan or anything in between, she was a remarkable and richly appreciated musical force.

What Rob Ruggiero and Dyke Garrison have attempted to do here, is to make a dramatic story out of this material by concentrating on the pain Ella was feeling at that particular time in 1956. Her  younger half sister had been her friend and protector in the days after their mother died, with Frances interceding on her behalf, and protecting her from her stepfather, Joe.

Will she make it through the concert without breaking down? Or will the song she wants to sing in tribute to Frances, “Blue Skies,” precipitate a crisis?

It was a moving moment, at least for me, but on the whole it was the music that appealed, far more than this  rather thin dramatic thread.

If you go to see this production — which is certainly enjoyable — you should go because you want to experience the closest thing you can to an evening with the real Ella Fitzgerald. If you like jazz, and you like songs by Gershwin and Porter and Mercer and Hoagie Carmichael and Duke Ellington and more, then this should suit you just fine.

If you want more of a dramatic play for your money, you might be a bit less  fulfilled.