King: The Musical in Concert – Hackney Empire

Picture: Nick Rutter

King: The Musical in Concert, Hackney Empire, London

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In this, the 50th anniversary year of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, it feels appropriate to revive this musical based on his life.

Although maybe “revive” isn’t the right word. King, performed in concert this weekend by the London Musical Theatre Orchestra, has previously received only one performance, in a semi-staged production showcase in 1988.

But despite positive feedback, composer Martin Smith’s musical never progressed further. And when Smith died from complications from AIDS in 1994, the prospect of King seeing the light of day seemed to recede forever.

And on the evidence of the LMTO’s production, that has been a total shame. Although this presentation is a concert production, it allows the sweeping score to come to the forefront.

Starting with a brief flash forward to King’s assassination and funeral, the musical proper progresses linearly through the reverend’s life, starting with meeting his future wife Coretta at a university dance. And in these early stages, it is Debbie Kurup’s Coretta who is the strongest of the two characters, Cedric Neal’s hesitant pastor being far from the leader of men he was destined to become.

Director Susie McKenna complements the musical concert action with projected black and white stills and newsreel footage of the civil rights struggle. This helps substantially with some of Act I’s more repetitive moments, such as in ‘Don’t Step Over the Line’, as each repeat of the chorus is illustrated with a further injustice against black people, culminating in a powerful solo by Angela M Caesar in the show of a lynched black man hanging from a tree.

In the shadow of this brutality, and of a policing regime which sought to stamp out any sense of protest, Dr King finds himself compelled to move south from Boston, and soon becomes elected to lead the bus boycott protests in Montgomery, Alabama which stemmed from NAACP worker Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat at the front of a bus, an area reserved for white passengers.

Neal’s King gradually gains confidence, but it is not until he finds a congregation in his new church that he really finds his voice. Kurup’s Coretta begins to fade into the background at this point, becoming (like Sharon D Clarke’s Alberta King, Martin’s mother) very much a supporting character in the title character’s story.

While such sidelining of these women may reflect the power dynamic between genders at the time, it denies the show two of its strongest voices. Although Clarke helps lead an ensemble with a glorious Act II opener, ‘We Ain’t’, both she and Kurup lose out by the concentration so much on one member of a family who gave so much to the civil rights cause together.

But then, it is Martin Luther King’s legacy which survives, in no small part to his mastery of oratory. Act I closes with a re-creation of his 1963 speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. Wisely, there is no attempt to sing the words, nor does Neal attempt a straightforward impersonation. What he does manage to do is repeat King’s words using the original cadence and phrasing, placing emphasis at places in each sentence where no actor ever would, but the civil rights pastor did.

With the full scale of the LMTO and the ensemble backed by both the Hackney Empire Community Choir and the Gosepl Essence Choir, Simon Nathan’s orchestrations and Joseph Roberts’ choral arrangements really show off Smith’s music to its best. It becomes hard to believe that a show that sounds so authentically American, so true to the hearts of the civil rights struggle, could have come from the pen of a white, British actor.

And yet despite the huge arrangements, some of the most powerful moments come from a cappella numbers sung by a group of male activists (the ‘Freedom Four’ of Jo Servi, Daniel Bailey, Adrian Hansel and Adam J Bernard). That Smith’s music is as powerful and evocative with a small number of unaccompanied voices as it is with a full orchestra and two choirs gives one hope that King can find a life as a fully-staged musical.

Scott Matthewman