AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
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Like his jazz contemporaries, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway, Waller often played the clown, his patter a smooth, disarming way to ingratiate himself with possibly unfriendly white audiences. Happily, Maltby’s 1978 Tony winner–and Apple Tree Theatre’s tenth-anniversary season opener–replays Waller at his uninhibited best, romping through toe-tapping tunes with infectious delight, turning everything into a party.
Backed up by a hot combo (music director Rufus Hill on piano, Rodney Harper on drums, and Gerald Lindsey on bass), the terrific five-member ensemble launch a rich retrospective of Waller favorites from 1922 to 1943. This seemingly unstoppable flow of felicitous tunes ranges from the almost surreal sophistication of the 1942 “Jitterbug Waltz” to the crowd-pleasing, hard-clapping vulgarity of the 1939 “Fat and Greasy.”
The most chilling moment comes during the eerily harmonious 1929 “Black and Blue,” a sort of protest blues; caught in a cold light, the ensemble create a frozen tableau as they choke out the lyrics’ litany of suffering and undercut it with the dated but curiously revealing qualification, “I’m white inside.”
