The words come dense and quick, as from Shakespeare or one of the Wu-Tang brotherhood, until they don’t come at all anymore and there’s just a mother’s long, musical moan: A son, a brother, another young Black man is dead, and “The Rules” mean somebody’s got to do something about it.
This is “Long Way Down,” a promising if overstuffed musical rethink of the blunt-force, beautiful YA novel by D.C. native Jason Reynolds. Told in stark and powerful verse in its first incarnation and adapted into a gut punch of a graphic novel in 2020, Reynolds’s best-selling saga spans all of 60 seconds — the minute it takes its 15-year-old protagonist, Will, to ride the elevator from his family’s eighth-floor apartment to the street, where Shawn, his brother, has been gunned down.
Inside that minute, though, lives a host of ghosts and stories, and as the neighborhood phantoms manifest one by one between floors, their reflections build a mirror in which Will is forced to consider not just Shawn’s death but also the life — the lives, rather, whole generations bound up in vicious cycles — that led to it. And he’ll have to ask whether following the Rules — don’t cry, don’t snitch, get revenge — will mean Will must meet the same seemingly inevitable end.
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End of carouselSounds pretty dense, doesn’t it? That’s the classic difference between showing readers something and telling them about it, and it’s one of the ways in which this musicalized “Long Way Down” distinguishes itself from the original. What began as a careful few words on a page has been expanded to include a storm of words on the stage, to say nothing of melodies and movement and a set and sound and lighting schemes. (Book, music and lyrics are by Dahlak Brathwaite and Khiyon Hursey, with lights and sets by Simean Carpenter, costumes by Danielle Preston, sound by Kevin Lee Alexander, and choreography by Victor Musoni and Ken-Matt Martin, who’s also credited as director.) All the things that make a musical, in other words, whether the story needs them or not.
Reynolds’s story definitely doesn’t need more than it originally came to the table with, but that’s not the fairest question. Whether the tale can support another round of evolutionary additions as sturdily as it sustained its graphic-novel adaptation feels more to the point — although I’m not sure it’s a question the production at Olney Theatre Center has answered satisfactorily. (It’s being prepped in concert with New York producers for an eventual shot at Broadway.) There’s a show here, one with things to say, and it’s saying them in a variety of appealing young voices and an array of styles, from hip-hop to R&B to gospel and soul. It’s boisterous and bracing and moving and funny and even fun from time to time, never mind that it also represents a knowing interrogation of an oppressive system that itself evolved in response to the failures of an oppressive system. What it’s not is the pungent, almost elementally forceful thing Reynolds created when he was working alone. I left feeling like a lily had been not just gilded, but also fitted with grills and asked to star in a flashy video.
Which, I have to stress, could be fine. One version of a great story needn’t work in quite the same way as the version that came before. But to be genuinely great, an adaptation does need to work on its own terms without abandoning the virtues that distinguished the original; Danica Novgorodoff’s graphic version of “Long Way Down” triumphs not least because the art speaks in organic visual overtones around the echoing spareness of Reynolds’s text.
This stage version works in endless diverting ways — in the anagrams and palindromes Will loves, in musical citations of artists such as Biggie and Kendrick and MJ, sometimes in visual arrangements so arresting they might themselves be frames from a graphic novel (when they don’t stutter like images in a buffering video). It’s bigger and noisier and shinier in most particulars, but somehow no combination of them ever lands with the startling power of Reynolds’s terse image-making.
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Maybe that’s where Brathwaite and Hursey’s take on “Long Way Down” has a bit more evolving to do. More focus, less flash. Some distillation of the extra-textual dynamics, so as not to dilute what’s best savored in concentrate. Less isn’t categorically more, but what is it the kids say about doing the most?
Long Way Down, through June 23 at the Olney Theatre Center. About 90 minutes without intermission. olneytheatre.org.
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