THE FIRST
The First opens with the Dodgers blowing the final game of the 1946 season, after which scout Clyde Sukeforth, manager Leo Durocher, and Branch Rickey (Joel Hatch) discuss signing the Kansas City Monarchs’ shortstop Jack Roosevelt Robinson (Alton Fitzgerald White). At first unsure as to whether Rickey’s offer is genuine or whether he’s just making a token gesture to “this year’s nigger,” Robinson takes the train to New York and signs with the Dodgers, fulfilling his lifelong dream to be “the first.”
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This Chicago premiere of The First (which opened, and closed after 37 performances, on Broadway in the fall of 1981) has been given a truly excellent production, with an abundance of talent onstage. Though Michael Duff’s musical direction and David Siegel’s arrangements give Brush’s sappy score a decidedly bar-mitzvah-band feel, the performers knock their songs out of the park, particularly White and Angela Lockett as Jackie and Rachel. The title song is probably not strong enough to be sung four times in the first act, but each of White’s renditions of it sends shivers up the spine. And Lockett’s masterful, contemplative exposure of Rachel’s loneliness among a group of white baseball wives in “There Are Days and There Are Days” is worth the price of admission in itself. You want to strangle the PA announcer who breaks into Lockett’s showstopper, detracting from her sublime performance. The big, splashy production numbers–like the lampoon of racist stereotypes in “Dancin’ off Third” and the spring-training workout song “Bloat”–though rather irrelevant to the plot have been choreographed with a biting sense of humor by Mark S. Hoebee and Kenny Ingram and are well executed by the cast.
