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Enter singing dancers, lots of them, and all of them very good.
You laugh / Because Im poor and black and funny / Not the same as you, it begins.
Well, thats sort of how it begins.
The mood pivots from stanza to stanza.
Director Zack Winokur is stingy with staginess.
Abe Lincoln makes an appearance on stilts, waving an Emancipation Proclamation big enough to wear as a cape.
But otherwise the stage is bare and props absent not that you would notice.
But I keep coming back to Tines, whose magnificent stage presence binds the show together.
Which is no reason why more traditional opera companies should let him slip away.
Its effectiveness is measured in the decibels of applause which at one point Tines even conducts from the stage.
We can only hope that the sentiments boiling up from the stage percolate into the classrooms upstairs.
