Making the Best of the Blues

On the morning of June 11, Ron Taylor, co-creator and member of the ensemble cast of Broadway’s “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues,” woke up feeling pretty good.

But when he looked in the mirror, he could see only half his face.

This might trigger concern in most people. Taylor, however, took a shower, got in a taxi and headed to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater to attend to the day’s business--even though, as he describes it now, “it looked like a storm was going on in one eye.”

In a recent conversation at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse--where “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues” opens next Sunday--Taylor recalled the events of that strange morning.

He entered the theater; a voice greeted him. But, though the voice was familiar, Taylor failed to recognize the face of the show’s stage manager, due to the tornado whirling in his range of vision.

Taylor finally had to admit to himself that something might be wrong.

“I can’t see people,” he confessed.

“Let’s go to the hospital,” the stage manager calmly replied. As it turns out, Taylor, 47, had suffered a small stroke, caused by a blood clot in his brain that impaired his vision. He was admitted to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital and forced to pull out of the show.

In the whirlwind of publicity that followed, many newspaper articles blamed the stroke on the stress of another very recent and well-publicized catastrophe: At the 11th hour, producers of CBS’ June 7 Tony Awards ceremonies dropped the scheduled performance of a musical number from “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues”--nominated for four Tonys, including best musical--because the program was running too long.

The broadcast included performances from all of the other four nominated musicals: “The Civil War,” “Fosse,” “Parade” and “Little Me.”

Getting national TV exposure on the Tonys is often considered crucial to the survival of a show. “Cutting this because of a disorganized Tony event could actually close us,” said Anita Waxman, a “Blues” producer, at the time of the snub.

In the aftermath, the cut was attributed to everything from racism to favoritism to just plain bad planning. But the relentlessly optimistic Taylor refused to blame the Tony Awards producers for the continued success or failure of “Blues,” just as he wouldn’t blame the stress of disappointment for his stroke.

Even though he spent the days after the stroke adjusting to blood-thinning medication and “floaters, like ‘Wheel of Fortune’ wheels before my eyes,” Taylor counts himself lucky that his stroke was no more disabling. He was back onstage five weeks later.

Sometimes bad things just happen, muses Taylor, who believes every storm cloud, even if stroke-induced, has a silver lining. It’s the way you survive it that counts.

That’s the story, he says, of the blues.

“I told the cast, before we went to the Tonys, ‘Don’t get caught up in the hype,’ ” says Taylor, a big man with an even bigger voice, who created the rumbling vocals for Audrey II, the voracious man-eating plant (“Feed me, Seymour!”) in off-Broadway’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” a role he held for much of the ‘80s.

“I never expected what happened on the TV, that they wouldn’t allow us to sing,” he says. “But even through that, I stood up on that empty [Tony Awards] stage with my producers and said, ‘God is good.’ I had my producers saying it with me: ‘God is good. It’s all going to work out, just do what you have to do. What happened here tonight is what the blues is all about.’ I was positive that it was still going to happen.”

“It” happened two days later, when David Letterman called to invite the cast to perform the Tony number on his show, giving “Blues” wider exposure than this year’s low-rated Tony broadcast could have offered.

From there, it’s been nothing but an upward trajectory for “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues,” a show that traces the history of blues music from its African roots to American pop, and turns the phrase “rags to riches” into an understatement.

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In 1987, Taylor, a native of Galveston, Texas, was at the Denver Center Theatre performing in “Lost Highway,” the story of the life of Hank Williams, written and directed by Randal Myler (the show went on to the Mark Taper Forum in 1988). Taylor played the role of “Tee-tot”--short for “teetotaler”--based on the real-life old blues singer who served as Williams’ mentor.

“He was not accepted at first by the Grand Ole Opry, but every lonely hearted woman listened to him on the radio; every man who’d lost his farm listened to Mr. Hank Williams,” Taylor says.

That show got Taylor thinking about the many offshoots of the blues--how the influence of African music can be felt in country, gospel, jazz and all forms of what he calls “Americana” music. “I thought, why not do a musical about the music these people created?” he says.

“Who named this music ‘the blues’? We don’t know,” Taylor continues. “But we do know this type of music helped people to survive. . . . It made the day go faster, it made the heat a little cooler for people who worked from ‘can’t see to can’t see’--from sunup to sundown.”

Taylor’s idea appealed to “Lost Highway” director Myler, as well as “Highway” cast member Dan Wheetman. But it took more than five years for the idea to gestate into “Blues,” an assemblage of 50 songs including “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Crazy,” “Strange Fruit” and “Fever.”

Taylor, who began his education as a football player at Wharton County Junior College in Wharton, Texas, was persuaded to join the college choir after its director heard Taylor’s booming voice when he was doing his best imitation of the Temptations in a hallway with some friends. Later, Taylor became involved with the college’s theater department, and a theater instructor persuaded him to audition for the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which at that point he had never heard of.

Taylor was accepted, and he headed to New York City for the first time. There, in 1977, he met his future wife, Deborah Sharpe-Taylor, when he portrayed the Lion and she was the understudy for Dorothy in “The Wiz.”

In 1988, the couple moved to Los Angeles. For several years, Taylor enjoyed success, landing roles in more than 19 films and appearing on more than 30 television series.

Then the bottom dropped out of Taylor’s Hollywood career because he refused a role. “I was asked to play a guy in prison who rapes another guy in prison,” Taylor says. “I said I couldn’t do it.” He believes his reluctance to take the role was what kept him from getting TV and film work for the next few years.

Taylor was reduced to using his distinctive voice to sell security systems over the phone to support his family, which by then included son Adamah, now 15.

But, as is his habit, Taylor made positive use of misfortune; he used the time to revive his dream of a musical about the blues. With Myler and Wheetman, and the two additions of Charles Bevel and Lita Gaithers, Taylor wrote “Blues.”

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The show’s first incarnation was a 45-minute revue for high school students that toured Colorado and Wyoming as part of Denver Center Theatre’s outreach program in 1994. The show proved so popular that the group was invited to present a production at the Denver Center Theatre.

Eloise Laws, who will perform in Los Angeles, was part of that first production. She researched the backgrounds of such legendary singers as Mahalia Jackson and Nina Simone to better understand and perform their music. “We [the cast] were asked not to try to become these people, just to know their background,” she says.

“It started as a school tour in the hills of Wyoming and went to Broadway,” she adds, her voice awe-filled. “I think a lot of it was spiritually motivated. You have to say there was a driving force, some kind of spiritual force out there, no matter what you believe in.”

In 1998, “Blues” moved on to San Diego Repertory Theatre, then on to New Jersey’s Crossroads Theater, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and the New Victory Theatre in Manhattan.

Then, another musical’s misfortune turned into a bit of luck for “Blues.” In February, flagging ticket sales forced the closure of “Parade” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, posting losses of $5.5 million. “Blues” was invited to move in. (“Blues” recently relocated to the Ambassador Theatre in New York. Taylor, Wheetman and Laws have been replaced in that production.)

It was another bit of serendipity that “Blues” came to the Geffen Playhouse. Gil Cates, producing director of the Geffen, went to see the show last year in New York, with no intention of bringing it to the Geffen. But he was immediately hooked.

“I was overwhelmed--it’s such an exuberant, happy, special experience,” Cates says. “It’s the kind of show where if you are not a blues fancier, you will be by the end of the evening.”

Critics have compared “Blues” to Broadway’s tour de force of tap dance, “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk,” because each traces the history of an African American art form. Taylor acknowledges that audiences are sometimes surprised to find the haunting sounds of rural slave music mixed in with more recent, more entertaining numbers.

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Director Myler--who besides his Williams show also wrote “Love, Janis,” a theater piece using the songs and letters of Janis Joplin--attributes the appeal of “Blues” to its simplicity.

“The show really started in its simplest form and stayed that way,” he says. “We wound our way to New York, and who’da thunk it? We were sandwiched in between the openings of some very large, elaborate musicals like ‘Civil War,’ with a small cast, no set, a small band. That was a feeling we always wanted to keep with this show.

“It’s talented people up there singing, spending the whole evening unencumbered by large things flying in and out, just singing their hearts out to the audience,” Myler says.

Cast member and musical director Wheetman believes that audiences are drawn to “Blues” because the cast reaches out to touch them--quite literally. “Very early on, the fourth wall is demolished and never returns,” Wheetman says.

Says Taylor: “At a point in the show, I say to the audience, ‘Take your neighbor’s hand and hold on tight.’ And at the Lincoln Center, all these rich people who go to see ballet and opera--they didn’t really clap as much, but they were holding hands with everybody. That’s what this show is.”

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“It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Opens next Sunday, 5 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Through Dec. 19. $20-$42. (310) 208-5454.