Low Down Dirty Blues Northlight Theatre
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Those songs take up perhaps 80 of the show’s 90 minutes, so it’s tempting to adopt the standard critical line on jukebox musicals: audiences come for the music, so everything else can be forgiven if not outright ignored. But the nonmusical elements in Low Down Dirty Blues aren’t benign—they’re confusing.
The show is set, apparently, in a south-side club called Big Mama’s. At the top, a woman who calls herself Big Mama welcomes the audience and launches into “They Call Me Big Mama,” Big Mama Thornton’s signature tune from the early 1950s. Given her vintage-looking dress and arthritic physicality, one might assume this character is supposed to be Thornton herself, maybe a few years before her death in 1984. Except there’s a recent Chicago Bulls pennant on the wall, and a few minutes later she sings “Don’t Jump My Pony,” written by Denise LaSalle in 1992. Maybe there’s a reason none of the songwriters is credited either from the stage or in the program—it’s an easy strategy for dealing with anachronisms.
Care to comment? Find this review at chicagoreader.com/theater.
