The song hunting expeditions of early 20th century musicologists, scouring rural backwoods to find tunes that have been become part of the nation’s fabric — as well as discovering authentic, previously-unknown voices is one ripe for theatrical adaptation, particularly a musical.
Frank Higgins’ “Black Pearl Sings!” is based on the interactions of John Lomax and Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Lugging a tape recorder, Lomax found Lead Belly singing in a prison, where he himself had been kind of a musicologist in stripes, soaking up old songs he heard there and singing them again.
All of that would make a stirring production, though Higgins gives it a twist by fictionalizing it and making both the musicologist and the imprisoned singer female.
The gender switch adds another level of interest to a Depression-era play that already deals with issues of race, culture, privilege, appropriation and stereotypes. The initially wary but ultimately successful interaction between cultures makes it perfect for Metro Stage, the Alexandria theater that practically specializes in such things. Artistic director Carolyn Griffin practically said so at the end of the opening performance.
For another thing, it has Roz White, a musical powerhouse in previous productions there from “Bessie’s Blues” to this year’s “Uprising.”
Time stops when she begins to sing, and with as most of the snippets of songs performed, she does it a cappella.
White has a good match in Teresa Castracane, a tough but well-meaning musicologist, who has been kept from top academic jobs because of her gender and thus finds a little something in common with Alberta Johnson, the suspicious, sullen prisoner whom she remakes into Black Pearl.
Castracane’s Susannah Mullally knows a terrific song when she hears it, and the actress adds her own fine voice doing mostly old Irish songs that dovetail with the Southern blues.
Had Higgins made his production about Lead Belly directly, what a wealth of songs he could have included, from “Rock Island Line” and “Midnight Special” to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Goodnight Irene.”
Here, he handpicks the odd public domain song, now credited to the fictional Pearl. Many of the tunes have their own interesting histories that go untold here: Among them, “Trouble So Hard,” originally sung by Vera Hall (who shares the writing credit with Alan Lomax for some reason), “Don’t You Feel My Leg” by New Orleans singer Blue Lu Parker, a commercial blues hit in the late 30s, or the gospel “Keys to the Kingdom” written by yet another woman, Jenny Lou Carson, a leading country music songwriter.
The appropriation of the campfire classic “Kum Ba Yah” fits, since it has descended, in at least one version of the history, from the Gulluh language used by African-Americans on the South Carolina Islands.
Pearl is from such an island — that would become Hilton Head — and there are a number of jokes in the script about how nobody would ever visit there, let alone play golf.
What would have made an absorbing night truly spectacular is if there had been some more fully developed musical moments — or at least full performances of songs with some kind of accompaniment aside from Mullally’s occasional dulcimer strums.
Instead, they’re presented more as brief musical illustrations. The longest numbers are there to teach a slip-hipped style of dance from one woman to another.
In “Black Pearl Sings!” the prisoner agrees to lend her voice in exchange for help in finding her daughter, and some of the show’s conflict — asking her to wear her old prison stripes while singing at Carnegie Hall — has direct connection to some of the issues between Lead Belly and Lomax.
With a wealth of issues with which to wrestle, though, “Black Pearl Sings!” directed by Sandra L. Holloway with William Hubbard as music director, doesn’t linger long enough to solve them.
“Black Pearl Sings!” continues through May 29 at Metro Stage, Alexandria, Va.