BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY – REVIEW OF 2025 SHAW FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Pearl Cleage’s play, Blues for an Alabama Sky  premiered in Atlanta Georgia in 1995 and has been produced in theatres around the United States as well as the United Kingdom. This is its first production in Canada. The play is set in 1930 depression era Harlem, New York and covers a broad spectrum of issues touching the black community of the era.

It has five characters. There is Guy Jacobs (Stewart Adam McKensy) the exuberant, talented, gay and optimistic gown designer whose aim is to make it to Paris. He has just been fired from his job at a club. McKensy gives a delightfully stellar performance, The stunning looking Angel Allen (Virgilia Griffith) is a backup blues singer in a bar. She was having an affair with the owner, a mobster, and was fired when she realised, she was being used. She was working in the same bar as Guy and they live in the same apartment. Griffin defines Angel as a woman of beauty and ambition who is used and abused by men and must compromise so she can survive,

Delia (Mary Antonini) lives in the same building and in the Shaw Festival production they have almost adjoining apartments. She is a social worker, working in a family planning clinic. Antonini is superb as Delia, the soul of decency. When Angel is left without a job, Delia offers to teach her to become a typist and earn her daily bread.

Sam Thomas (Allan Louis) is a doctor in a Harlem hospital and like Delia, a man of humanity. Well done by Louis. Leland Cunningham (JJ Gerber) is a recent arrival from Alabama who is attracted to Angel and she accepts him as her lover because of her strained finances. He is a bigot who cannot accept Guy’s homosexuality and is literally violent against abortion. They are all black. 

l to r: Mary Antonini as Delia Patterson, JJ Gerber as 

Leland Cunningham, Virgilia Griffith as Angel Allen, 

Stewart Adam McKensy as Guy Jacobs and Allan Louis 

as Sam Thomas Blues for an Alabama Sky (Shaw Festival, 2025). 

Photo by David Cooper.

In Guy we see a a man full of life, fearlessly optimistic and dreaming of the ultimate symbol and reality of success – getting work in Paris. In the meantime, he is generous to Angel and helps her financially and wants her to go with him to Paris. Delia plans to open a family planning clinic but the building that she wanted to rent is bombed.

Angel finds out that she is pregnant with Leland’s baby but is not sure she wants the baby at all. Sam performs an abortion but she pretends that she “lost” the baby. Eventually she tells Leland the truth with disastrous consequences.

The play is more than the story of these five people in Harlem in 1930. It is a portrait of the lives of blacks who encounter prejudice, social problems, racism and at times the difficulty of survival. Cleage has crafted the play carefully and realistically without melodramatics. The characters are shown drinking excessively even in Prohibition America but they retain their humanity and their dreams.

The production is meticulously directed by Kimberley Rampersad who gives us well-defined people who love, laugh, enjoy parts of life and live in hard times with the attendant difficulties exacerbated by the color of their skin. The performances by the five actors are superb.

The sets by Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart need to make the design suitable for the theatre-in-the-round Studio Theatre. She uses an open concept for the apartments of Delia and Guy with minimal props and skeletal separation among the rooms occupied by the characters.   
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Blues For An Alabama Sky  by Pearl Cleage will run in repertory until October 4,  2025, at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre as part of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press, Toronto

FORGIVENESS - REVIEW OF 2025 STRATFORD FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas 

Forgiveness is a play by Hiro Kamagawa based on Mark Sakamoto’s book FORGIVENESS: A Gift from My Grandparents that was published in 2014. The play premiered in Vancouver in 2022.

The play tells the horrific stories of the treatment of Canadians of Japanese origin during World War II and later and the treatment of Canadian soldiers in Hong Kong and Japan who were prisoners of war. I refuse to hyphenate Canadians because that makes them second class citizens. A Japanese Canadian or Japanese-Canadian (or Italian-Canadian or Greek-Canadian with or without a hyphen) is somehow not as good as an unhyphenated Canadian. Never hyphenate your Canadianism. If asked or your accent makes it obvious that you were not raised in Canada, you may tell them your country of origin but never let them call you a hyphenated Canadian.

Canadians of Japanese descent had a lot more to worry about in British Columbia after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Their Canadian status and their legal rights as permanent residents or citizen were trampled on and they were put in concentration camps, their property was confiscated and they did not see justice, if you can call it that,  for decades after the war was over.

All of this was not done by Canadian bigots or small-minded people though there was no shortage of them. The decisions were made at the highest levels of government by people who knew or should have known exactly what was happening. What kind of people did we have in government in power or the civil service who ordered such barbarity and inhumane treatment of innocent people? (You can start with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King who was an antisemite.)

The racist policy against the Japanese did not end with the war but lasted until 1948. They were given a choice of moving east of the Rockies or being deported to Japan. Most of them were Canadian citizens and many had never lived in Japan. Oh, yes, Canada apologized for its inhumanity in 1988  and made some reparations. Count the years between 1942 and 1988 and bow your head in shame. 

Jeff Lillico as Ralph with Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue 

in Forgiveness. Stratford Festival 2025. Photo: David Hou.

There is a parallel story of the barbarity against the Japanese that the play illustrates with unerring precision. Canadian soldiers were taken prisoners of war after the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941. As Ralph (Jeff Lillico) one of the main characters in Forgiveness states he fought for two and a half weeks and was a POW for three and a half years. Ralph  lied about his age to enlist and he and his friends Deighton (Joe Perry) and Coop (Gabriel Antonaci) ended up as POWs.

There were about 2000 Canadians whose treatment in the prison and labour camps in Japan beggars the imagination. The play illustrates part of that treatment through commandant Kato (Hiro Kanagawa). Ralph is assigned as a servant to the unhinged, sadistic and alcoholic Kato but survives almost miraculously. His friends do not and Ralph has nightmares about their fate.

The leading characters that take us through the parallel stories are Ralph and Mitsue Sakamoto  (Yoshie Bancroft). The play has more than forty characters played by 13 actors and covers a period of from the late 1930’s to 1968. The action moves back and forth chronologically over forty years and it becomes difficult to follow, not to say confusing. The actors take on numerous roles making it difficult to follow some of them. Steven Hao plays eight roles!

There is a rich use of projections with original illustrations and animations by Cindy Mochizuki handled by Projection Designer Sammy Chien. The Set and Costumes by Lorenzo Savoini are marvellous but watching for details in the theatre-in-the-round Tom Patterson is difficult. And we have the sound design by Olivia Wheeler and the lighting by Kaileigh Krysztofiak and we are loaded to the gills with things to follow and hopefully absorb.

Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch) marries Ron Sakamoto, the son of Mitsue Sakamoto. Ralph) makes his daughter promise to name her son Mark. She is not pregnant but  she does promise. Her son Mark is the author of the book and the reason for the name is Ralph’s reference to the Gospel of Mark. It is what he refers to when Deighton and Coop accuse him of not trying hard enough to save them. He reads to them from Mark: “And when you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father…may forgive you your trespasses.”  

The play ends on a note of grace and some humour. Ralph and his wife Phyllis (Jacklyn Francis) have dinner with the Sakamoto family. It is the ultimate symbol of reconciliation.

But looking at the treatment Canadians meted on the Japanese and the Japanese on Canadian soldiers, is forgiveness possible or desirable. There is the racism of people in power who disregarded all human decency, compassion and legal rights by ordering innocent people’s lives to be destroyed. Was there any evidence that they regretted their actions to merit forgiveness? The ruling class embraced and enforced racist laws that caused immeasurable pain. Can one who lived under those conditions forgive the perpetrators. On what basis does one forgive?

Can we judge from the comfort of our office? That’s a question of morality that may have little to do with review of a production.

In any event, Forgiveness is a major theatrical event that has the added punch of covering a hugely important part of Canadian history. One may quibble with aspects of the production (or its morality for that matter) but we owe a debt of gratitude to Kanagawa and Sakamoto for bringing it to our attention in grand theatrical fashion.
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Forgiveness by Hiro Kanagawa adapted from the memoir Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto contributes to September 27, 2025, at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford, Ontario.

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The reek Press, Toronto