[Dixielandjazz] "Ethel!" reviewed - Philadelphia Inquirer

[Robert Ringwald]

Review: 'Ethel!'
by Howard Shapiro
Philadelphia Inquirer, February 24, 2012
Once you're gone, so are your rights to the way you're portrayed. The sleazy Roy
Cohn isn't around to contest the character Tony Kushner assigns him in "Angels in
America" (or my one-word characterization) and none of the Scottsboro Boys, from
the recent musical about a horrible piece of '30s American history, can challenge
their stage depictions.
That brings us directly to the Walnut Street Theatre, where the late Ethel Waters
is playing again, sort of, for the first time since 1949, when she was on the main
stage in "A Member of the Wedding." Now, on the third-floor stage in the Walnut's
Independence Studio series, the singer, actress and barrier-breaker is being re-enlivened
by Broadway's talented Terry Burrell ("Threepenny Opera," "Into the Woods," "Dreamgirls"),
who's written "Ethel!," a one-woman show she delivers with oomph and vigor -- and
a questionable depiction.
Her Ethel Waters, born of a rape at knifepoint in Chester, raised by a grandmom on
Clifton Street in Center City and a hit singer in Harlem clubs in her mid-20s, is
not the generally humble person portrayed here twice in recent years in another one-woman
show called "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," named for one of Waters' great gospel songs.
Maybe that Ethel Waters wasn't so true-to-life, either.
In Burrell, we have a completely different Waters. "Ethel!" plays on the performer's
reputation for distrusting white theater managers and some white colleagues (with
justification), for suffering fools unhappily, and for doing things her own way.
Instead of Waters at the end of her life in 1977 when she'd become a star again with
the Billy Graham Crusade -- Burrell cleverly anticipates that -- "Ethel!" shows us
a younger, more vital woman in the 1940s, at an apartment in Harlem. This allows
Burrell to plumb Water's career when she was down-and-out and being hounded for back
taxes, and before her career would revive. Up to this point, she'd been a performer
with many firsts -- among them, the first black actress to star in a Broadway play
("Mamba's Daughters" in 1939) and to appear with an otherwise all-white cast ("As
Thousands Cheer" in 1933), as well as a big Columbia Records star.
What we get from Burrell, who, with pulled-back hair, looks much like Waters in mid-career
pictures, is a girlish woman who tells stories on herself in a haughty black-mamma
style popular in current film comedies: pursed lips, chin jutting defiantly to and
fro, and a surfeit of att-ee-tood.
Burrell's script gets the anecdotes right. But the portrayal, as entertaining as
it is under Kenneth L. Robertson's direction, is time-warped; it doesn't seem real.
The singing certainly does -- backed surely by Aaron Graves on keyboards and Andrew
Nelson on bass. Burrell delivers Waters best when she's singing "Stormy Weather,"
"Cabin in the Sky" and other songs Waters made famous. That's when I thought Ethel
Waters was once again at the Walnut.


--Bob Ringwald
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