‘Summer: The Donna Summer Musical’ is lukewarm stuff

‘SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL’: (left to right) LaChanze as ‘Diva Donna,’ Ariana DeBose as ‘Disco Donna’ & Storm Lever as ‘Duckling Donna’. Photo: Joan Marcus

SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL
Songs by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Paul Jabara & others
Book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary & DesMcAnuff
Choreography by Sergio Trujillo
Directed by Des McAnuff
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West 46th Street
877-250-2929, http://thedonnasummermusical.com/

By Scott Harrah

Donna Summer was not just the Queen of Disco. Anyone who was alive in the 1970s knows she was a pop-cultural phenomenon, a powerhouse who changed pop music, brought R&B and soul to a white audience and most important of all, was an influential icon of gay-male culture before AIDS. Knowing these facts, and loving her music, makes watching this misguided “jukebox musical” about Donna Summer all the more frustrating.

Donna Summer, who died of cancer in 2012 at age 63, had such an unprecedented career full of ups and downs and a glorious songbook that has all the elements of a blockbuster musical, but sadly Summer: The Donna Summer Musical is anything but.

Blame it on the scattershot, ineffective book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and Des McAnuff, and the choppy direction by Mr. McAnuff (who definitely could do better since he won the Tony for directing the best “jukebox” opus ever, Jersey Boys). Bruce Sudano, who was married to Ms. Summer for 32 years, reportedly gave the show’s creators rights to her life story, but he obviously had too much say in the creative control because so many of the facts have either been sanitized or glossed over.

First, everyone should know the three actresses playing Ms. Summer at various stages of her life, from young “Duckling Donna” Storm Lever to Broadway veteran Ariana DeBose as “Disco Donna” and the older “Diva Donna” LaChanze, are all excellent. Ms. Lever has an angelic voice and portrays the young Donna with incredible vulnerability. Ms. DeBose, a rising star who’s been in everything from Hamilton and Motown to A Bronx Tale, is pure sass and ebullient energy when she sings classics like “I Feel Love,” “Bad Girls” and “MacArthur Park.” Finally, LaChanze (who won the 2006 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for The Color Purple) is often haunting as the older, wiser “Diva Donna,” especially when belting the lesser-known ballad “Friends Unknown.” All three women do justice to Ms. Summer’s vintage hits, but of course no one could ever replicate the late singer’s inimitable, multi-octave vocal range, but Ms. Lever, Ms. DeBose and LaChanze are all outstanding in their own right regardless. Especially noteworthy is Ms. DeBose and LaChanze’s rendition of “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” the golden classic duet by Ms. Summer and Barbra Streisand. Ms. Streisand and the Queen of Disco both had the greatest female pop voices of the 1970s, and Ms. DeBose and LaChanze do a brilliant job recreating the song.

Mr. Domingo, Mr. Cary and Mr. McAnuff have patched together half-baked, episodic scenes with stilted dialogue in an attempt to weave Ms. Summer’s turbulent career and songs into a narrative. Chronologically nothing makes sense here to anyone who lived through Donna Summer’s glory days and downfall. Important figures in Ms. Summer’s career, from Italian producer Giorgio Moroder (Kaleigh Cronin) to Neil Bogart (Aaron Krohn), the record executive who helped make her a star, are written as one-dimensional cartoons. Scenes with her family back in Boston and an an abusive lover in Los Angeles are so poorly written and melodramatically executed, they seem like scenes from a bad daytime soap.

The book writers pay lip service to the decline of disco, but mostly blame Ms. Summer’s sudden drop in record sales in the early 1980s to mismanagement by her then record label, Casablanca, and there was much more to it than that if one knows about music from the era. One piece of dialogue early in the show, “For the longest time, people had me convinced there was something wrong with this music. ‘Dance music.’ Like the term was some kind of insult, “attempts to explain, perhaps, why her journey through disco stardom was so short-lived. Did the authors of the book forget about the backlash against disco? Anyone of a certain age remembers the summer of 1979 when a Chicago DJ, unhappy with so many radio stations switching to all-disco formats, destroyed disco records on air and got huge amounts of publicity. Disco was a threat to traditional rock, and appealed to a gay and black urban demographic, and Donna Summer typified the genre.

The most puzzling and downright offensive fault of Summer is its depiction, and lack thereof, regarding Donna Summer’s enormous gay male following. Gay men were the first to embrace Donna’s music, but for some head-scratching reason Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo mostly have women in drag as men in the chorus. Toward the beginning of the show, Donna says the disco scene was “A world of mystery and androgyny, blurring all the lines. It didn’t matter if you were a boy or girl or anything in between. All that mattered was that you were ready to dance.” It is a shame the creators chose to tell us this fact instead of simply showing us.

Near the show’s end, when LaChanze as Diva Donna sings “Friends Unknown,” with projections of photos of gay men dancing, that audiences even see what the world of Donna Summer was really about. She talks about the infamous “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” statement that made many gay men protest her—and her career never quite recovered from such a stupid and asinine statement as a result. It was gays who made Donna who she was, and she paid the price for offending her most devoted fans. Donna spent the rest of her life regretting it, but this fact is barely explored. Was it all simply a harmless joke she made at a concert, as depicted here?

Depicting the truth and consequences of any troubled celebrity’s backstory is the only effective way any biography, stage, film or book, should be written.

Donna Summer was a mega talent and a pioneer, paving the way for Madonna and other female recording artists. She was also a tremendously flawed and private person, and she deserves a more thoughtful, intelligent, uncensored stage adaptation of her legacy than this. Her life was “Hot Stuff” indeed, but this musical is lukewarm at best.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published April 26, 2018
Reviewed at April 25, 2018 press performance.

‘SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL”: Ariana DeBose. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL’: Storm Lever. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL’: LaChanze. Photo: Joan Marcus