“The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin” plays at City Center July 27, 7:30 p.m., 131 W. 55th St., nycitycenter.org.
Director Bob (i.e. Bob Fosse, cigarette in mouth, with that 1970s “All That Jazz” cool cat swagger) likes Viveca, who goes by the nickname “Bubbly.” She is a good-natured child of Los Angeles turned aspiring Broadway dancer and the title character of Kirsten Childs’ satirical and semiautobiographical 2000 Off-Broadway musical, “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin.”
Director Bob may even cast her in his new musical (“Chicago” apparently?), but he would like her to try that monologue about the woman who kills her husband during breakfast with an iron skillet again — with a different spin.
“This time . . . don’t go white on me, Bubbly,” he says, wagging his finger. Viveca, who has spent her life straightening her hair, idolizing Gwen Verdon and secretly wishing that she had lighter skin, has no clue what to do. She ultimately performs the monologue again in the ridiculously southern style of Foghorn Leghorn (“Ah say! Ah say!”). Bob loves it and Viveca is cast. But later, when Bob asks Viveca to give a performance that is “a little less . . . dark,” a newly enlightened Viveca is ready to take a stand.
City Center’s summertime Off-Center series (a spinoff of its popular Encores! series of musicals of the past, performed in concert and focusing on Off-Broadway titles), opened two weeks ago with Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s chilling 1990 musical, “Assassins.”
Like “Assassins,” “The Bubbly Black Girl” originated at Playwrights Horizons, one of the most crucial incubators of innovative Off-Broadway musicals. Unlike “Assassins,” “The Bubbly Black Girl” is far less frequently performed and revered by critics, but it is a smart, unusual and interesting show and an ideal programming choice for the Off-Center series.
In an interview published in the City Center playbill, Childs talks about how she wrote the musical as a therapeutic way of dealing with her past. In the musical, Viveca has been shielded by her parents from the turbulence of the Civil Rights protests. She has trouble processing the murder of young girls in Birmingham, Alabama, as a child and a racial profiling incident with the police as a teen.
Leading the cast as Viveca is Nikki M. James, who won a Tony Award for “The Book of Mormon” and, earlier this summer, played Portia in the controversial Shakespeare in the Park production of “Julius Caesar.” With an outsized smile and big voice, James more than captures Viveca’s sunny personality, sincerity and innocence.
Staged by director-playwright Robert O’Hara, the concert-style production has a nice simplicity, with music stands up front, prominent lighting above (along the same metallic grid that was used to evoke a shooting gallery in “Assassins”) and a backdrop that suggests more Hollywood Hills than Manhattan. The energetic choreography — full of 1960s youth dance crazes and characteristic Bob Fosse touches — is by Byron Easley.
The score has some catchy pop/R&B sections, but is mostly forgettable, and the book scenes can be meandering. The patchy narrative style resembles a one-woman monologue awkwardly surrounded by various musical numbers and group encounters.
But the key idea behind the show — a young African-American woman coming to terms with her own identity and pervasive cultural stereotyping — is explored by Childs with great humor and honesty.
