Also this issue: Kelly's Girl John Kelly is a man of many faces -- including Joni Mitchell’s. -David Warner Drawing Borders It's Mural Arts Month, and the Mural Arts Program is celebrating new growth and facing new controversy. -Ted Mann Nancy Crow at Snyderman Gallery Form and function collide in Nancy Crow's quilts. -Robin Rice Stan and Jan's Plan -Debra Auspitz Word From Your Mtter -David Warner Balanchine Favorites at Pennsylvania Ballet -Janet Anderson Fully Committed at Philadelphia Theatre Co. -David Anthony Fox Eternal Spiral Project's I Stand Before You Naked -David Anthony Fox

October 24-30, 2002

theater

Crowns at McCarter Theatre

You can keep your hat on: Janet Hubert shares a piece of history in Crowns.

by Toby Zinman

This irresistible show about the African-American tradition of women wearing hats -- big hats, small hats, wide-brimmed, pillboxes, with feathers, bows, flowers and ribbons -- to church is based on a recent book of photographs and anecdotes by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry. They interviewed women in North Carolina who were glad to tell their stories, express their “hattitude” and have their pictures taken. That the photos are in black and white captures the old-timey quality of the fashion, and much of Crowns evokes a nostalgia for a past likely to vanish with the generation now middle-aged and older.

The show -- with its stories and its sermons and its gospel music and its revival dancing -- is enough to make you rush right out and buy a hat. And call your mother. And visit your grandmother.

The six women and one man who make up the topnotch cast come to Crowns with powerful Broadway credentials. Carmen Ruby Floyd, Harriett D. Foy, Lynda Gravátt, Janet Hubert, Ebony Jo-Ann and Lillias White manage, remarkably, to sound like women -- not Broadway stars -- singing together. Lawrence Clayton, who plays "Man" -- the preacher, the husband, the brother -- has moves aplenty, and can slide effortlessly from genteel husband of the 1950s to a contemporary street teenager. They are all accompanied by Bernard Corbett on the piano and the thrilling David Pleasant on percussion.

Regina Taylor, herself a remarkable performer, wrote the script to put the book onstage and also directed the show. It is a shame that she contrived a narrative armature to hang the hats and the reminiscences on, since it dilutes the juice. The weak plot has a Brooklyn teenage girl, in a baseball cap, running wild after her brother is shot. She is sent to live with her grandmother in North Carolina. This young character who often just sits and listens is an unclear personality, and becomes an excuse for snippets of racial history lessons. Rather than give the show a center, it compromises the real deal with the contrived and the cliched.

What she -- and we -- learn about is the power of hats and of a cultural tradition connecting her to all these women, to a slave past and before that to the African traditions of head coverings. Gospel song after terrific gospel song demonstrate that musical thread -- in the rhythm, in the shoulders, in the hands raised and the knees bent; it is only because this was a Princeton audience that we all sat primly in our seats.

These "hat queens" have some great lines, not to mention "hattitude." One of them tells us, "I'd lend my children before I lend my hats -- my children know their way home." Another's refrain is "my mother always said, Œput somethin' on your head.'" The complicated ties between religion and womanliness and old-fashioned decency are contained in one woman's line: "I'm going to church to meet the King -- so I have to look my best." And the lyric from the spiritual echoes through the show: "When I get to heaven/ Gonna put on my crown/ I'm gonna walk all over God's heaven."

Emilio Sosa made the terrific hats and dresses. The show is on its way to New York, so catch it here, while you can still get a ticket.