Marion J. Caffey has said of the six women who make up the two alternating casts of “Three Mo’ Divas” that before being wowed by their talents, you’ll say, “Who are they?” And then after you hear them sing you’ll say: “How come I don’t know who they are?”
Due to the intense vocal demands of the show, the two casts, Cast A and Cast 1, alternate performances. If Cast 1 is anywhere near as exhilarating as Cast A, then Caffey has a lot to take credit for. Written as a means to showcase the amazing talents, which essentially have never been given the recognition they deserve, “Three Mo’ Divas” highlights the beauty of the black female voice. It expresses the unfairness surrounding the fact that such talents have been shut out from the tightly-knit opera world. In a beauty all its own, this show does not reprimand the world for keeping such talents so isolated, but instead exuberantly allows the audience to see all that it has been missing out on.
Each of the divas in this performance deserves an innumerable amount of praise. NíKenge Simpson-Hoffman possesses amazing versatility, effortlessly gliding between operatic grandeur and jazz, with a bit of Beyoncé thrown in for good measure. Jamet Pittman’s “Your Daddy’s Song” is enough to bring tears to your eyes, and her operatic immensity makes obvious why she was most recently seen on Broadway in Baz Luhrman’s “La Boheme.” Henrietta Davis brings the audience to its feet in exaltation during “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” though her operatically-trained voice struggles through attempts at scat in “All of Me.”
It is lucky that the stunning quality of these voices keeps the audience enthralled in each song, because the show itself lacks coherence. The musical selections of the evening range from opera to jazz, spanning the course of 400 years. Despite the beauty of each selection, there is no consistency within the musical selections.
The costumes of the evening are lackluster as well; Melanie Watnick’s designs seem to rely on the talents of the women wearing them to keep the audience from paying too much attention to the costumes themselves. The color-scheme depends heavily on blacks, reds and whites when a little more color could add much more life to the stage.
The scenic and lighting designs by Dale F. Jordan, on the other hand, add quite a lot to the show. His decisions for the scenic design are subtly poignant. He makes very strong choices in a show that could deteriorate into being simply an evening of music, instead of a chance to elegantly and simply instruct the audience to believe what they see — not merely what they hear.
