Imagine a night in the musical theater where you get compressed versions of “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady” plus “Funny Grandma” with a coda of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that includes the song “What a Wonderful World” by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss.
The shapeless and meandering new show “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical” opened Monday at Studio 54, and we can only be grateful that its creators left out the jazz legend’s childhood in New Orleans. The book by Aurin Squire tells the story of Armstrong through his four marriages. Squire doesn’t really make it clear if Armstrong (James Monroe Iglehart) kept marrying essentially the same strong woman or if Squire could not distinguish the prostitute Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins) from the trained musician Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming) from the Hollywood wife Alpha Smith (Kim Exum) from the Cotton Club headliner Lucille Wilson (Darlesia Cearcy, the vocal standout of the show).
As presented here, Armstrong is a talented and very amiable man whose only real direction in life is collecting a lot of wives, each of whom gets about 30 minutes on stage. That doesn’t give much time for character development, because there are also a lot of standard songs to be sung, from “Kiss of Fire” and “Avalon” to “When You Are Smiling” and, of course, “Hello, Dolly!”
One of the musical’s few galvanizing moments comes at the top of Act 2. Armstrong goes to Hollywood and meets Lincoln Perry (Dewitt Fleming Jr.), a sophisticated and assured movie star. Perry is better known as Stepin Fetchit, and it is “the laziest man in the world,” as the actor was billed, to teach Armstrong that he’s got to have a gimmick to charm white movie audiences. For Armstrong, that gimmick is The Smile. The only problem is, Iglehart’s Armstrong has been giving everyone The Smile since he first stepped on stage back in New Orleans years ago. Fleming Jr. doesn’t offer a very convincing impersonation of Stepin Fetchit, but at least his drawling Fetchit contrasts vividly with his snappy Perry.
Only two of Armstrong’s wives in “A Wonderful World” share a dramatic scene: when Daisy charges Alpha and Louis of bigamy. Otherwise, one actor could play all four female roles, which might give some theatrical flair to a show that’s lacking in panache.
Christopher Renshaw directs, and Iglehart and Christina Sajous are credited as co-directors. If there isn’t an adage about too many directors in the theater, there should be.
