Jolson & Company

Publish date: 2024-10-01

If Al Jolson wasn't the meanest, nastiest, most self-centered performer in show business, he campaigned hard for the title. If Stephen Mo Hanan's eerie musical impersonation of the legendary entertainer is any indication of his phenomenal talent, Jolson was precisely the kind of gifted monster the theater adores to death.

Oy vey, what an ego on this guy! If Al Jolson (or “the World’s Greatest Entertainer,” as he preferred to be called) wasn’t the meanest, nastiest, most self-centered performer in show business, he campaigned hard for the title. But what a set of pipes! If Stephen Mo Hanan’s eerie musical impersonation of the legendary entertainer (to whom he bears an equally uncanny physical resemblance) is any indication of his phenomenal talent, Jolson was precisely the kind of gifted monster the theater adores to death.

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It’s no easy task, finding the humanity in someone whose public persona and personal failings are larger than life. Working with a clear vision, a diagrammatic book and a tiny cast with a lot of chutzpah, Hanan and company pull it off with terrific efficiency. (Warning to amateur theater companies: Don’t try this trick at home!) So-called book hangs on a 1946 radio interview with Barry Gray that the authors have pushed up to 1949 (the year before Jolson’s death) and set on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater, where the singer had packed them in for show after show between 1911 and 1928.

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“I’ve been away from you a looong time,” the 64-year-old Jolson croons at his audience. Arms spread in yearning, eyes rolling in fear, his desperation to be loved drips like sweat.

Jolson’s all-consuming need for love is the emotional thread that binds the multiple scenes in this impressionistic version of his life. In recounting the highs and lows of his career — from his vaudeville beginnings and early success on Broadway, through his rise in radio and talking pictures, to his evolution into an icon in the biopic “The Jolson Story” — the show takes the performer’s own perspective, translating every success into a validation of his personal worth.

By the same token, every man, woman and producer who crosses his path is a figment of memory; from titans of the entertainment industry to the four women he wedded and wore out, they exist solely to give or deny him love. In virtuostic turns by Nancy Anderson and Robert Ari, who play more than a dozen colorful roles between them (her Mae West is divine; his Harry Cohn a hoot), these big-scaled, broad-featured characters are no less vivid for being Jolson’s fantasies.

Hanan’s fearless performance undercuts the sentimentality of early flashback scenes that take Jolson back to the harsh days of a childhood scarred by the early death of his mother (who encouraged him to “sing, so you shouldn’t be scared”) and the disapproval of his Lithuanian immigrant father, who wanted little Asa Yoelson to follow in his footsteps as a cantor, instead of picking up pennies by singing “goyishe music” on the streets of Washington, D.C. Hanan rescues these soggy scenes by playing the driving ambition and blinding determination of the young singer-comedian, who soon left for San Francisco and the bright lights of vaudeville.

While making no excuses for the ego-driven performer, whose selfish demands and abrasive personality would alienate countless colleagues on his career march to showbiz immortality, Hanan’s shrewd performance lets Jolson make his own case through his music.

Although he catches the muted-trumpet wail and barrel-chested thrust of the Jolson sound, Hanan isn’t trying to entertain us with the 14 great signature songs he delivers here. Used as touchstones for his insights into Jolson’s character, the songs are the only outlet for candid expression available to an emotionally speechless character like Jolson.

In this dramatic context, a mindless ditty like “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along” becomes a miniature drama of the 43-year-old star’s disastrous marriage to his third wife, 19-year-old Ruby Keeler, as Hanan allows the jaunty optimism of the song’s opening verse to darken into pain, sorrow, panic, rage and regret. “My Mammy” drops its heart-tugging sentimentality and becomes the terrified wail of a man who knows he is unloved and a performer who fears he has been forgotten.

Hanan’s musical character-building hits its high with “You Made Me Love You,” in which Jolson unlocks the driving sexual energy that he felt safe expressing only in blackface.

“That makeup loosed me up,” he says. “If I was big and wild and free like I am, and lookin’ like a white guy, they’d run for the doors.” Oblivious to the racial connotations that cause contemporary noses to quiver, Jolson saw himself as a champion of black music, “the man who brought jazz to Broadway.”

That the show should be so dark and blunt and yet so entertaining says a lot for Peter Larson’s musical direction, which goes out of its way to project the narrative line, and Jay Berkow’s staging, which presents the show’s multiple scenes with a knife-edged clarity that leaves no plot points dangling, no characters scrambling for footing. Gail Bandoni performs the same service with eye-catching costumes in bold colors and patterns that define time, place and character at a glance.

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Jolson & Company

Century Center; 296 seats; $65

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