‘Jelly’s Last Jam’
City Center
Through March 3

Jelly Roll Morton would have loved “Jelly’s Last Jam,” even though it hardly portrays him as an admirable character — heroic, certainly, but not sympathetic. Morton clearly thought of himself as the larger-than-life star of his own story.  

He certainly would have been ecstatic that the original production was a major hit in 1992, and even earned him a Tony award for best original score — an accolade that did not exist at the time of his death in 1941. He would have been thrilled that the show led to a new appreciation of his life and music. Morton would also love the exciting new production at City Center Encores!, directed by Robert O’Hara.

The great New Orleans pianist, composer, and bandleader — not to mention inveterate gambler, pool shark, raconteur, and other less savory occupations — would have been so happy to be the center of this much attention that he wouldn’t have minded that much of the dramatic action in the plot is the invention of the book writer and original director, George C. Wolfe, and lyricist Susan Birkenhead.  

Even the title is a stretch: it’s clever to pun the stage name of Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, “Jelly Roll,” with the idea of a “jam” session, but the words go together better than the concept goes with Morton himself. Morton was not known for “jamming,” as we understand the concept today; rather, he was among the very first to write the music down, to organize it, to orchestrate it, to perform it with carefully prepared ensembles. He was a formidable pianist and soloist himself, but his greater legacy is as composer, arranger, and bandleader.

Frankly, even as a lifelong devotee of the real Jelly Roll, I don’t even mind that the story only gets the vaguest outline of his biography correct; as an art form, musical theater isn’t supposed to be driven by a notion of historical accuracy — it’s an interpretation and a variation.  

Morton himself  transformed an old French quadrille — or so he said — into the all-time jazz standard  “Tiger Rag.” Likewise, Ms. Birkenhead and the show’s original musical director, the late Luther Henderson, transformed his original songs, stomps, rags, blues, and even “Joys” — he famously called one number “The Milenberg Joys” — into theater music. More than outfitting them with new lyrics, they restructured the songs to tell his remarkable story, stretching from boyhood, when the young Creole is introduced to jazz and blues by a legendary trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, to his death, from complications of a knife wound at age 50.

The narrative actually begins at that moment when Morton, played by the excellent Nicholas Christopher, leaves this world behind and confronts a shadowy figure called “The Chimney Man,” in the person of the exuberant and dynamic Billy Porter.   Together, they narrate Morton’s life story in a manner similar to George Bailey and Clarence the Angel in the first half of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Since piano pyrotechnics don’t necessarily play well on a Broadway stage, this Jelly Roll is more of a song-and-dance man — the originator of the role in 1992 was Gregory Hines, in his major Broadway triumph. At City Center, the choreography, by Edgar Godineaux and Dormeshia, almost never stops from start to finish — this is foremostly a dancing show. 

As Jelly, Mr. Christopher is in virtually every number, aided by John Clay III as Jack the Bear, an amalgam of several characters as Morton’s sidekick, and Joaquina Kalukango as Anita, the closest thing to a leading lady in the story. Alaman Diadhiou also shares the stage with Mr. Christopher as young Ferdinand.  

Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, Stephanie Pope Lofgren, and Allison M. Williams are “The Hunnies,” a trio of three female sprites — sort of like hot harpies in Greek mythology — who enhance the story with yet more song and dance.

Daryl Waters and William David Brohn are credited with additional orchestrations, and the band, which features several well-known New York jazz players, like trumpeter Alphonso Horne and pianist Lafayette Harris, is an excellent one. Best of all, Morton’s great music is heard continually; “King Porter Stomp,” which he apparently never considered one of his best works — he never recorded it with his most famous band, The Red Hot Peppers — but which probably became his most famous work during the swing era, comes in intermittently throughout.

In the middle of Act 1, there’s a moment when Morton’s respectable Creole grandmother, a show-stopping turn by the formidable Leslie Uggams, essentially casts him out for playing jazz rather than the European classics and for consorting with whores and other lowlifes at Storyville, the Crescent City’s infamous red-light district. At this point, Mr. Christopher yells, “This never happened!” Ironically, this is one of the few incidents in the story that actually did happen — his family wanted no part of him from then on, and he changed his name.  

The actual events of Morton’s life, and the essential content of his character, will probably be endless sources of debate and controversy. The Chimney Man denounces Morton as “he who drinks from the vine of syncopation / But denies the black soil from which this rhythm was born.” Morton is the worst kind of racist, ignoring his own African-American heritage and denouncing anybody, even old friends and lovers, darker-skinned than he is. 

He’s also a braggart, an egomaniac, and claims over and over again to be the sole inventor of jazz. Mr. Wolfe and Ms. Birkenhead amplified some of these aspects from Morton’s own recollections in his legendary interviews for the Library of Congress in 1938, which subsequently formed the basis for one of the greatest books ever written about American music, Alan Lomax’s elegiac and moving “Mister Jelly Roll” (1950).  

Yet recent biographers, such as Howard Reich and William Gaines in their 2003 “Jelly’s Blues,” have taken issue with both Lomax and the portrayal of Morton in this show; they even subtitled their biography, “The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton.”

Still, this is a show that must be seen, regardless of whether you know anything about Morton’s music or New Orleans jazz. Here’s hoping that “Jelly’s Last Jam” in all of its bawdy, bluesy, and syncopated glory, will turn on yet another new generation to Morton’s amazing music.