Making 'Sistahs' Sing: It's All
Relative
By Jane Horwitz
Special to The
Wednesday, August 8, 2007; C05
Composer William
Hubbard and writer-lyricist-director Thomas W. Jones II also work as
performers and so they know how to put their music where their mouths are.
"That's the power of their collaboration to me," says actress-singer
Crystal Fox. "Because they're actors . . . I think they have a sort of
character about the music as well."
Fox, Felicia Curry
and Bernardine Mitchell play the contentious adult
siblings in "Three Sistahs," the
Hubbard-Jones show based on a story by Janet Pryce and inspired in part by
Chekhov's "Three Sisters," revisiting MetroStage
in Alexandria
through Sept. 9.
"The beauty of
this piece is that the music makes sense," observes Curry, who plays the
youngest sister, Irene, a college girl with a 'fro who agitates against the Vietnam
War and for civil rights. "There's never a moment when these women open
their mouths to sing a song that doesn't make sense in the story they're trying
to tell," she says.
Fox plays Marsha,
the unhappily married middle sister, and Mitchell plays the eldest, Olive, a
college professor. The three have gathered at their childhood home, circa 1969,
after the funeral of their brother, a casualty of the Vietnam War.
One of the goals in
shaping the musical was to make the songs "a part of the conversation in a
living room, rather than stopping and doing a big song and dance," Jones
says. He just writes dialogue and when characters seem compelled to rise from
prose into poetry, "I can hear that progression. I can hear them go from
spoken to sung text." Hubbard then finds the music to express the lyrics.
Curry calls Hubbard
a "genius," but the composer says he doesn't know "if that's
particularly genius or just something that feels right and you go with
it."
Jones finds
Hubbard's creative process fascinating. "It's so internal. He'll stop
playing for a minute. He'll either tap on the keyboard or tap on his chest. He
goes back to the piano," Jones says, "and all of a sudden this thing
comes out."
What comes out in
"Three Sistahs," Hubbard says, are
"gospel influences, there are certainly R&B influences, there are a
little bit of standard, old standard jazz things. It . . . runs the gamut . . .
some of it is just a song -- it doesn't have to be categorized." Hubbard,
who plays keyboard live from the sound booth at the performances, got his love
of music in all its forms listening to the jukebox in his grandmother's
restaurant in
He and Jones have
reached a point of trust, Hubbard says, so that if a song works, fine, and if
not, "we're not locked in and the song police are not going to come and
arrest me. . . . It is really a wonderful atmosphere that Tom and I have
created, and to me, it's essential to what we do and how we work."
Since MetroStage first presented "Three Sistahs"
in 2002, Jones has discarded subplots and tightened the story. And he sees new
parallels in it. "Four years ago, it was a nostalgia piece . . . three
women, three different generations, trying to find their way back to each
other," he observes. "The last four years, Iraq
and Afghanistan
have really made the thing resonate in different ways."