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His Eye Is On The Sparrow

Media Reviews

Marietta Daily Journal:
Current Theatre in the Square play should be required viewing
05/13/2010
Everybody should be required to see His Eye Is On The Sparrow currently running at Theatre in the Square in Marietta. Of course, everybody in this country can’t get into the Theatre in the Square before the play finishes its run at the end of May, but maybe the people in charge could extend its stay for a few decades or so.

It is that good.

The play is about the late Ethel Waters, a blues singer and fine actress who finished out her career singing on the Billy Graham Crusades in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. But it is more than that. It is about race relations and what kind of world this would be if there were more Ethel Waters and Billy Grahams operating in this world today.

According to the play by Larry Parr, Ethel Waters grew up illegitimate, angry and poor in one of Philadephia’s worst areas and confronted racism in her unrelenting drive to the top of the business that makes you wonder how civilized a nation we really were back then. (She showed up for a performance in Macon and a young black boy was lynched and left in the theater lobby where she was to play.)

This understandably led her to mistrust all whites to the point where she saw every white person as racist thus, turning into a racist herself.

Enter Billy Graham who began encouraging her to sing at his crusades. (One can only wonder how many lives this great man has impacted in his career.) Waters resisted until she woke up one day and found she didn’t like any-thing about herself anymore. Graham convinced her that the color of one’s skin didn’t matter to him and certainly didn’t matter to God.

What made the performance so remarkable to me — besides an electric performance by Atlanta's Bernardine Mitchell and an exceptional pianist named Renee Clark — was seeing blacks and whites interspersed throughout the theater laughing at the same lines and chatting wih each other during the intermission. We had all found common ground for a brief couple of hours. We had all been reminded that it is not the color of our skin that is important, it is the fact that we are all God’s people— black and white.

We all left the theater — some wiping away tears — and no doubt will quickly fall back into our routines of look-ing at each other with suspicion and complain about the other’s racism, sometimes with justification.

But for a couple of magic hours, we were all one group of Americans enjoying something in common — a dyna-mite play.

It should be required viewing by everybody in the land. We would all be better for it.

Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Theatre Review
05/13/2010
One of the less depressing anecdotes Ethel Waters shares in “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” a one-woman show about the legendary singer and actress (1896-1977), concerns her breakthrough in the 1939 Broadway drama “Mamba’s Daughters.”

As thousands cheered, so to speak, New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson panned the play and Waters’ performance. There was such an outpouring of support from the Broadway community — several big stars took out a full-page ad and signed their names to an open letter praising Waters — that Atkinson ended up going back and reviewing the show a second time.

Take it from another critic: It must be nice to have that luxury. Director Gary Yates’ Theatre in the Square staging of “Sparrow” features Bernardine Mitchell, whose incomparable singing voice may be the only recommendation the show needs. In resonant renditions of such Waters hits as “Dinah,” “Black and Blue” and “Stormy Weather,” she enthralls.

Based solely on her opening-night performance, however, Mitchell’s tentative grasp on all of her dialogue kept the character from being very emotionally involving. (I can only review what I saw, but given her standing as one of Atlanta’s pre-eminent veterans, no doubt this particular issue of memorization has already corrected itself.)

There are other problems with the show, as written and conceived by Larry Parr. As a solo piece recounting the ups and downs of Waters’ long life, the structure is necessarily sketchy, but at times it’s overly obvious and forced. After a failed first marriage (at 14), Waters meets a new man — cue her song “Taking a Chance on Love.” Eventually, she must choose between her second marriage and her career — cue “Am I Blue?”

Some of Parr’s biographical details are sketchy, too. For all we hear about those two unhappy divorces, there’s nary a mention of her third marriage to bandleader Ed Mallory, which lasted some 40 years. And if you mainly know Waters for her most famous role in “The Member of the Wedding,” you could be disappointed that it’s dismissed in one fleeting reference.

When she isn’t struggling with her lines, Mitchell establishes a warm rapport with the audience that often belies or sugarcoats Waters’ “lonely, discouraged, troubled” nature and her reputation for being temperamental and difficult to work with. Moments of anger and rage, mostly dealing with the racial injustices she faced, develop suddenly as opposed to organically, and Mitchell tends to overact them.

It doesn’t help that Yates periodically incorporates synthesized mood music to underscore especially melodramatic scenes. Or that he equips Mitchell with a body mic (when she shouts, she SHOUTS) — an odd move considering the intimacy of the Marietta venue, the natural power of her voice, and the fact that she’s accompanied only on piano by music director S. Renee Clark.

Grade: C

Bottom Line: Perhaps opening night was just an off night.

Smoke Signals: News from Big Canoe:
It just doesn’t get any better than His Eye is on the Sparrow: Bernardine Mitchell -- portraying Ethel Waters -- owns this role
04/30/2010
This play is about the life of Ethel Waters as she reminisces. The place is her mind. The time is 1957. Ethel Waters was the illegitimate daughter of a Philadelphia prostitute. Born in poverty at the end of the nineteenth century she rose to fame as a singer, and as a stage and movie star. Her life was the tragedy of being poor and black in the first five decades of the twentieth century. Her triumph is her victory over her own prejudices through the strength of her faith. It is a moving, uplifting and inspirational story interspersed with many pieces of humor … and song. There are eighteen musical pieces woven into this play.

This is a one woman play—but what a woman! Bernardine Mitchell has won the Dramalogue Award for best actress in Los Angles for her portrayal of Bessie Smith. The Helen Hayes Award in Washington DC and Alexandria Va. And the Suzi Bass Award in Atlanta for her portrayal of Mahalia Jackson. She must get an award for this performance.
She just knows how to do a vocal and “It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot,” she just gives that rhythm every thing she’s got.

In act one she swings through “Frankie and Johnny” and rocks through “The Joint is Jumpin’,” a tune up until last night I thought Fats Waller owned. There were parts of “Little Black Boy” that were operatic in feeling, and of course her renditions of “His Eye is on the Sparrow” (she sings the title song three times) is pure joy and emotion.
As the house lights dimmed for the second act we were treated to a solo piano performance by S. Renee Clark. She reprised “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “The Joint is Jumpin’”. She was rewarded with a deserved thunderous applause from the audience. Another great native Atlanta talent! She sounded like “Fats” hitting his “stride,” if you’ll pardon the pun.

So when act two began I didn’t think it could get better but it did. Bernardine went through four Tin Pan Alley and movie pieces and stamped each one as her own. She sang “Taking a Chance on Love” as good as Ethel Waters did—and it is my favorite Ethel Waters tune. I couldn’t write this review without recalling every word of the 1929 chestnut “Am I Blue?” When Bernardine sang it she infused such a blues feeling into the lyric it became a new and much more beautiful song for me.

Dinah”, “Heat Wave”, “Cabin in the Sky” and “Stormy Weather” were also sung, each with a firm feeling for place and time. Bernardine seems to know how to inflect true feelings—never stretching, always caressing the notes and words. When she dumped the verse to “Stormy Weather” in the middle of the song, the change in pitch and melody made this listener stop and think again about this song. It blew me away.

But in the end it was her return to a Fats Waller tune, the Waller, Harry Brooks’ anthem of the civil rights era “Black and Blue” that was the emotional highlight of the evening. The play strategically placed this stirring musical number with Ethel Waters’ moment of epiphany to conclude the evening. She then reprised “His Eye is on the Sparrow. There were people around us in tears.

If you didn’t take my advice and see “Always…Patsy Cline” last month at Georgia Ensemble Theatre, here’s your chance for retribution. Go see “His Eye is on the Sparrow”; you will love it.

Creative Loafing:
As long as Mitchell sings, Sparrow soars
04/30/2010
Supposedly no two people are alike – so why do so many biographical stage plays share DNA? Practically the same genetic code underwrites shows about the lives of famous musical entertainers, especially when written for three actors or less. The signature compositions frame a series of anecdotes that begin with the subjects' humble upbringing and find a crescendo at the height of their popularity – which usually marks the intermission and anticipates an inevitable decline due to personality flaws and/or old age.

Theatre in the Square's His Eye Is on the Sparrow, a portrait of trailblazing jazz singer Ethel Waters, touches all the bases of the bioplay, from name-dropping famous fans to keeping track of significant paydays. Waters goes from a $10-a-week vaudevillian to a $1,000-a-week celebrity chanteuse, beloved by audiences of all races. Bernardine Mitchell unquestionably has the soaring vocal prowess and the stage presence for the part, but His Eye Is on the Sparrow frequently stays earthbound during its nonmusical moments.

Contemporary audiences may not recall Waters' fame or cultural contributions. The second African-American actress nominated for an Academy Award, she introduced many blues and jazz classics to the American repertoire. The first act, recounting Waters' escape from her miserable childhood in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, emphasizes festive juke-joint songs, including "I Don't Dig You, Jack," "This Joint Is Jumpin'," and "Old Man Harlem." Mitchell sings with brassy brightness on the upbeat ragtime numbers, and draws out the last note of "Sweet Georgia BrooOOoown" like a trumpet soloist.

The second act includes a lively version of "Heat Wave," written by Irving Berlin as an affectionate satire of Josephine Baker, but primarily emphasizes romantic ballads and melancholy tunes like "Am I Blue." For the sorrowful songs, Mitchell croons more deeply, as if her heart's sunk to the bottom of a well. Sparrow hits its musical and emotional height with an epic rendition of "Stormy Weather," which evokes personal heartbreak, defiant assertiveness and, finally, an operatic expression of life's misfortunes. Nimble-fingered S. Renee Clark backs Mitchell up on keyboards.

The show's portrayal of the Jim Crow South, particularly Georgia, proves far from sweet. Waters arrives at a gig in Macon to discover a lynching victim left at the theater she's scheduled to play. In an even more harrowing episode, she suffers a car accident and must endure painful surgical procedures without anesthesia, a luxury denied African-Americans in the South.

Most plays that replicate the voice of their subjects have the tame quality of authorized biographies that gloss over the star's personality flaws. Sparrow strays from the template to dig deeply into Waters' difficulties with food, self-hatred and her own prejudices. She repeatedly (and repetitiously) identifies herself as a "bastard" child of rape, raised in a "whore's alley," and resents her half-sister's lighter complexion. (Apparently skin color provoked on-set friction between Waters and Lena Horne.) In middle age, she fills her emotional void with food, particularly "the new holy trinity: doughnut, pig's feet and apple pie," and the singer, nicknamed "Sweet Mama Stringbean" as a teenager, gains hundreds of pounds. In the song "Black and Blue," Waters wrestles with her demons and questions whether she's a racist herself before she finally finds comfort in the church.

Directed by Gary Yates, His Eye Is on the Sparrow covers a lot of emotional ground, but on the one-woman show's opening night, Mitchell still seemed to be struggling with the spoken text, in contrast to the infectious pleasure she took with the songs. In addition, the show's use of echo effects for dramatic embellishment prove obtrusive, suggesting the sound design could use a tweak.

And while Mitchell conveys a girlish innocence and transparency for Waters' youth, she seems to get stuck in that childlike mode well into the character's adulthood. Presumably, Mitchell will find a steadier footing after a few more performances, and she'll rise above the play's bouts of stormy weather.

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