From “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” to “Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical,” Chicago audiences have had several opportunities this year to delve into the stories of Black pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll. Currently playing at Northlight Theatre, “Marie and Rosetta” dials back the clock even earlier to the 1940s, when gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, known as the “Godmother of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” was shredding on the guitar and singing soulful duets with Marie Knight.
Written by George Brant and directed by accomplished Chicago actress E. Faye Butler, this two-hander play with music is a more intimate affair than your typical jukebox musical. Starring Bethany Thomas as Rosetta and Alexis J. Roston as Marie, the show celebrates not only the fierce talents of these two women but also the loving bond that forms between them. It’s a slow-burning play that surreptitiously winds its way around your heartstrings, then gives a mighty tug.
Although Sister Rosetta Tharpe is no longer a household name, her legacy outlived her untimely death at the age of 58. Posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, she influenced Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, Mavis Staples, Bob Dylan and others with her blending of gospel music, swing rhythms and the electric guitar.
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When the lights come up on stage, Rosetta is in her early 30s and already a gospel star. It’s 1946, and she has just signed on a new touring partner, Marie, a talented younger singer whom Rosetta discovered performing in a quartet. The two musicians are rehearsing — and staying the night — in a funeral home owned by a friend. As Rosetta explains to Marie, being a famous singer doesn’t make touring Mississippi as a Black woman any easier; she employs a white bus driver and stays anywhere she can find lodgings on “the Good Samaritan Circuit.”
Over the course of the evening, the two women get to know each other through conversation and by playing and singing together. They have obvious chemistry, despite their age gap and different life experiences. Marie, already a mother, is married to a preacher and skeptical of Rosetta’s crossover appeal to both church congregations and nightclub crowds. No less faithful but with a more open, joyful approach to her art form, Rosetta helps Marie loosen up and put some swing into her music.
Thomas and Roston shine in these musically demanding roles, with Thomas’ bluesy tone and gravelly low notes complementing Roston’s soaring vibrato and clarion riffs. Music director and pianist Morgan E. Stevenson and guitarist Larry Brown provide accompaniment offstage as the actors mime with their instruments. I’ve rarely seen this arrangement work so well; in particular, Thomas and Brown were so synchronized that I had to check my program to make sure that there was, in fact, an offstage guitarist.
Not only do they sound fantastic, but the leading ladies also look stunning in McKinley Johnson’s costumes, with Thomas in a shimmering, floor-length gown and Roston in a high-necked, metallic A-line dress. Against the largely white backdrop of John Culbert’s set, Jared Gooding provides subtle lighting changes during the songs. Although we only see Marie and Rosetta in rehearsal, the lighting allows us to imagine what they would look like in concert.
The toe-tapping songs punctuate witty, warm dialogue that mostly keeps up the pace in a show that runs nearly two hours without an intermission. The two women open up about the highs and lows of their marriages, and Marie shares her conflicted feelings about leaving her two children behind to go on tour. This raw discussion of motherhood, in an era when it was less common for women to work outside the home, sets up an important plot development later on.
Late in the play, there’s a shocking twist that would be a shame to spoil, but I will say that this paradigm shift casts the entire show in a different light. Frankly, it’s been a while since I shed tears so unexpectedly in a theater. I could hear from nearby audience members that I wasn’t the only one thus affected by the play’s final moments, which are tenderly directed and performed.
While she was born in Arkansas, Sister Rosetta Tharpe got her start in Chicago, soloing at the 40th Street Church of God in Christ in 1921, when she was only 6 years old. More than a century later, her music and the story of her cherished relationship with Marie Knight are revived for a new generation at Northlight Theatre.
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
Review: “Marie and Rosetta” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Aug. 13
Where: Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Tickets: $30-$89 at 847-673-6300 or northlight.org