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player ready...Some 30 years ago, Sheldon Epps had a cool idea for a hot show.
Why not fuse the music of Duke Ellington with the plot of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and set the whole thing in swinging 1930s Harlem?
“My idea was to celebrate Black excellence, Black artistry and Black joy,” said the veteran American director, now 73 years old, over a recent drink in a Chicago bar. “It existed during that period because Harlem was a magical place. And it can exist again now.”
At the time, Epps was the associate artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. So that’s where “Play On!” started in the fall of 1996 before a move to Broadway the following spring, replete with a cast that included Tonya Pinkins and André De Shields. To write the book for the musical. Epps had tapped Cheryl L. West, a writer with long ties to Illinois who had penned such works as “Holiday Heart” and “Puddin ‘n Pete.”
“Play On!” got respectable reviews and both Pinkins and De Shields were nominated for Tony Awards. But it got “overshadowed,” in Epps’ words, that season and failed to find an audience. It lasted just 61 regular performances,
But then in 1998, Epps approached Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls about a new Chicago production of the show, allowing him to do more work on the piece. “I fell in love with the brilliant cast recording of “Play On!” after the Broadway production had closed,” Falls recalled this week. “Sheldon called me out of the blue to see if the Goodman might be interested, and I jumped at the chance.”
Pinkins and De Shields both came to Chicago and a newcomer named Paul Oakley Stovall joined the cast. That staging was a big hit with the late Tribune critic Richard Christiansen, who called the show “a summer-long smash.” And the show got a whole new life.
Things went quiet again for “Play On!” after that, even as Epps, who still lives in Los Angeles, pursued a 20-year stint as the highly regarded artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, ending in 2017 with his return to freelance work.
But now “Play On!” is back in Chicago, city of its rebirth, this time at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, with Epps again in the director’s chair for the show he conceived, and that he hopes might first go back to London’s West End and then maybe even back to Broadway, famously different from in 1997. There is a 16-person cast, about half of which is Chicago-based, and a six-piece live band, knocking out the Ellington hits.
The new Chicago staging follows a successful United Kingdom tour in 2024, directed by Michael Buffong, whom Epps said had discovered the show while sitting in New York’s Lincoln Center library, where Broadway musicals are memorialized. That British tour sparked renewed interest on this side of the Atlantic, especially since Epps had already been taking to Barbara Gaines before her retirement as artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare.
Gaines said that she thought the show was about “nothing but love and pure joy and glorious music” and was delighted it was finally playing on Navy Pier.
For his part, Epps said he had beefed up the Shakespeare this time around (aptly enough, given the venue) and also leaned much further into the choreography, this time forged by Edgar Godineaux. “What we are doing is a lot more challenging this time,” he said.
The longtime stage director also said he is picking and choosing his projects carefully now, being the beneficiary not just of a successful career in theater but as a TV director (he worked on “Frasier” and was the primary director for the first five years of “Girlfriends” among other network shows).
But he’s still floating musical projects. Indeed, his work was last seen in Chicago in 2022 at the Studebaker Theater in a show titled “Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical,” a piece about the the late R&B pioneer Lloyd Price (“Lawdy Miss Clawdy”) that was aimed at Broadway, but at a time when the industry still was recovering from the COVID pandemic.
“I love working in Chicago,” Epps said. “And while I don’t have to work for the money, I do like to do something that ignites my passion. That’s true of this show, even after all these years.”
Play on, indeed.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
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If you go
“Play On!” runs Sept. 11 to Oct. 18 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.; www.chicagoshakes.com