Review: CRAZYSEXYCOOL: THE TLC MUSICAL at Kreeger Theater

The story of TLC has always deserved a wider audience. If Gloria Estefan, Elvis, Alicia Keys, The Four Seasons, Tina Turner, Cher, Bobby Darin, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Carole King can have their own Broadway bio-musicals, why not some Black girl magic about this girl group who galvanized hip hop/R & B/rap music fans for a decade in the 1990s? Yo, Broadway.

Kwame Kwei-Armah, recently of Baltimore's Center Stage and London's Young Vic, has dramatized TLC's story without melodramatizing it. The book he has written for CrazySexyCool—The TLC Musical takes care to to weave the individual story of each member of the group into the history of the group itself. T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli lived and live complicated and vigorous lives—there's much more to these women than record sales, music videos, and Grammy awards. It's a great story—well told. Kwei-Armah's other job, Director of this splendid production, has been made easier by the talented cast.

Holli' Gabrielle Conway (Tionne 'T-Boz' Watkins), Jade Milan (Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes), and Stoney B. Woods (Rozonda 'Chilli' Thomas) simply excel. Triple threats all, they more than meet the significant challenges of Chloe O. Davis' choreography as do the baker's dozen in the ensemble who double as the people in TLC's lives while backing up many of the two dozen musical numbers from the TLC catalogue. And Felicia Curry plays two roles with her usual outstanding skill and imagination. In Act I, she portrays one of TLC's managers—a strong woman like the younger women she managed, but a little too bougie to serve for the duration of the group's career. In Act II, Curry becomes the exact opposite as a healer and guru who helps Left Eye recover from and cope with some of her unfortunate circumstances and life choices. The heart of the show is TLC's support for each other, and Conway, Milan, and Woods perform each woman with power, love, and friendship. The music is pretty cool too.

Audience members who already know the words to the songs will be at an advantage because Gareth Owen's sound design drowns out about 50% of the lyrics. There's a group of capable musicians somewhere in the building who play unseen by audience and fellow performers alike. Their playing is over-amplified by the sound plan. The lighting design by Japhy Weideman, while ample and imaginative, frequently makes it impossible for the audience to see the show for which it bought tickets because bright lighting instruments are routinely aimed at the audience's eyes. Peter Nigrini's projections often seem disjointed and sometimes don't read clearly. One the very positive side, David Holcenberg and Jaret Landon (Music Supervisor et. al. and Music Director et. al. respectively) contribute mightily to CrazySexyCool—The TLC Musical, enabling the music that derives from one hard core style to dovetail with another; rap and Broadway are not natural bedfellows (what's the feminine for “bedfellows”?), but Holcenberg and Landon make them seem so. Dede Ayite's costume designs create the strongest visual element of the production; every garment matches every moment—TLC onstage, off-, back---always represented perfectly by what Ayite has them wearing.

Swifties, members of the Bey Hive, the TLC Army, and newbies to TLC's world will appreciate Kwei-Armah's and Arena Stage's joyous telling of the arc of this sisterhood of talented performers, who, like Judy Garland before and Taylor Swift after them, had to rise above the music industry's tendency to exploit female artists before admitting the equality of their excellence. You go, audiences.

(The two and a half hour show runs through August 9 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW near the Green Line Waterfront station.)

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