Minnesota stage star Greta Oglesby is doing her first show in the Twin Cities since losing her pastor husband, Dennis, in June. Hers is a special, spirited return.
Review: With return of grieving star, Penumbra’s ‘Black Nativity’ strikes a deeply personal note
Greta Oglesby helps retell the story of Jesus’ birth with righteous, roof-raising conviction at the St. Paul venue.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
December 10, 2024 at 7:00PM
A featured soloist in Penumbra Theatre’s “Black Nativity,” Oglesby infuses her performance of hymns, carols and gospel songs with conviction and beauty. She delivers with total assurance, and her numbers do not feel like performances at all but personal testimonials about triumph over faith-testing adversity.
On the Negro spiritual “My Way’s Cloudy,” she surrenders her whole heart with soulful confidence, as if she knows that her plea to “send one angel down” will be answered, by and by. And on “It Was Poor Little Jesus,” a bluesy number, Oglesby delivers from a place of triumph, for poverty and rejection have no dominion in this realm.
Oglesby headlines “Nativity” alongside fellow featured vocalists Dennis Spears, Deborah Finney and Angela Stewart, who also is the choir director for this 32nd edition of the show. Narrated with preacherly sonority by Jennifer Whitlock, the production is deftly directed again by Lou Bellamy, who, with music director Sanford Moore, orchestrates what is essentially a sermon in song and dance.
The tenor of “Nativity” is set at the very beginning as the show opens with an irrepressible and strident “Victory Chant (Hail, Jesus).” That theme is suffused throughout the show, including on “No Room at the Hotel,” featuring soloist Marie Graham, the venerable singer who draws from the same soulful well as Aretha Franklin.
As Graham sings off to the side, dancers MerSadies McCoy and Hassan Ingraham transmit, in their tremulous bodies and expressive limbs, the contours of the old story with new spirit and vigor. Marciano Silva dos Santos’ choreography has the dancers moving with agitation and even dragging before getting to a place of literal, ascendant light.
“Nativity” has always been a roof-raising show, but this year’s production feels markedly refreshed. Soloist Spears, for example, has much stronger vocal power and technique. And his octave-skipping on “O, Jerusalem in the Morning” — a mildly competitive vocal quartet number with Oglesby, Stewart and Finney — does not feel like wanton showboating.
In fact, as he scats “oo-wee,” his articulation of struggle and pain gives way to Oglesby’s airily serene release.
When poet Langston Hughes set about retelling the story of the birth of Jesus in “Nativity,” he found parallels with the African American experience. The show celebrates a figure whose arrival was unwanted but who, in turn, offered life-saving light.
Penumbra uses a plethora of musical styles to showcase that light, including blues, jazz and gospel. But the show also has rock ’n’ roll guitar licks and, new this year, a dancehall reggae beat for “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.”
That number is for a newly added third dance segment, choreographed by dos Santos to encapsulate Mary and Joseph’s entire physical and psychic journey. The song also charts the experience of sitting in the audience at Penumbra this holiday season. For this “Nativity” is a spirit-loosing ode to joy and exultation.
‘Black Nativity’
When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 4 p.m. Sun. Ends Dec. 22.
Where: Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul.
Tickets: $20-$45, 651-224-3180 or penumbratheatre.org.
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