Still, the story line remains more or less on track so far. It’s in bumping a hitherto peripheral character – the nondescript, nonsinging, nondancing club manager – to the fore that the rewriters simultaneously triumph and overstep. As the updated counterpart, de facto den mother Lucille Wallace, Loretta Devine (who achieved stardom with Dreamgirls) is assigned a number of songs that challenge her current vocal capabiity. Text-wise, she’s fantastic, “Lu” having been assigned all the wittier, more insightful lines. As for her side-plot romance with Vera’s fixer, Tony? Conveying not the slightest trace of thuggish menace (would that be un-PC?), Jeb Brown plays the gangster like a benign Park Avenue toff who thinks that he’s the main story.