Paradise Blue at Portland Playhouse

It’s 1949 and gentrification is threatening Detroit’s Black Bottom, the city’s historic African American neighborhood. Blue, a talented but tormented trumpeter, must decide if he wants to fight to keep his jazz joint, the Paradise Club, alive. When a mysterious woman full of secrets and ulterior motives comes into town everything Blue thought he knew, and his relationships with the people at the heart of the Paradise Club, are thrown into question. Dominique Morisseau’s noir inflected musical drama explores the price of ambition, the weight of history, and what it means to be a people fighting to find their song in a community on the brink.