Kirsten Childs’s Bubbly Black Girl effervesces for SpeakEasy
By CAROLYN CLAY | November 21, 2006
 LIFE LESSONS: but also irony and a few surreal touches. |
Don’t anyone break Viveca Stanton’s bubble; she has a whole musical in which to do it herself. The title character of The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (who’s nicknamed Bubbly) spends 30 years — encapsulated into 95 minutes — learning to embrace her color and de-effervesce, all while pursuing her modest dream of becoming “the greatest dancing star in the world.” Kirsten Childs’s Obie-winning, autobiographical 2000 musical is receiving an infectious area premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through December 9). And if Bubbly, fizzing like a Pepsi while fielding a Pepsodent smile, does not exactly become Gwen Verdon, she does achieve success in both the terpsichorean arena and the comfort zone of her own — confidently fixed — skin. Childs was a Bob Fosse dancer in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as a sometime lyricist working with jazz-musician brother Billy Childs before crossing over to write musicals. That phase began with a one-woman performance piece that became the book musical currently lighting up SpeakEasy. And you thought what former Fosse dancers did for the rest of their lives was visit chiropractors. Bubbly Black Girl is a little like an after-school special meshed with a one-woman Chorus Line and buoyed by an almost continuous pop score that offers surprisingly complex choral arrangements in numbers that range from doo-wop to gospel to jazzy echoing of Chicago. The SpeakEasy production features an adept side-stage combo led by musical director José Delgado and fields some good singers, in particular effortlessly bright and sonorous Boston Conservatory junior Stephanie Umoh, who charms in the title role, and Brian Richard Robinson as the girl’s father. Director Jacqui Parker, though she respects the vividly hued fable Childs has drawn from her life, hits hard the musical’s few tough or somber notes. David Connolly’s choreography incorporates ’60s dance trends as well as ballet and Broadway, though no one in the show is an inspired hoofer.
Although laced with its central character’s naïveté, Bubbly Black Girl offers along with its life lessons some irony and a few surreal touches that include a nightmare sequence featuring the Klan and Harriet Tubman with a gun. This dream grows out of Los Angeles pre-teen Bubbly’s response to the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls in 1963 — an event that seems remote from her middle-class California life, where her fantasies, when not inspired by terrifying headlines, tend toward visions of turning as white as her long-blond-haired talking doll, Chitty Chatty (a non-trademark-violating riff on Chatty Cathy), who’s represented here by both an insipid little vinyl honky and two robotic white actresses who join Bubbly in rhythmic, a cappella chitty-chatting on “Sweet Chitty Chatty.”
Bubbly’s is a sheltered world but one filled with mixed signals: Mommy wants her daughter to bone up on African-American history and cradle a black baby doll but also teaches her to straighten her hair; Daddy’s doting, non-trouble-making advice is to “Smile, Smile” your way through life — an approach for which Umoh’s irrepressible Bubbly seems a natural, whether she’s trying to get cast as Sleeping Beauty in dance class (the role goes to a lighter-skinned girl) or, later, hanging with ridiculous white hippies or black youth sporting Afros and attitude. Even when castigated by her black schoolmates for being an “Oreo,” Bubbly remains defiantly optimistic, pronouncing the confection “a damn good cookie.”
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