Choir Boy: not our grandparents' gospel

2 Nov 2022 - photos from Canadian Stage promo

"We found the group that, when they sing together its gold," says director Mike Payette (Cockroach, Angelique) of the cast of Choir Boy. "The skies open up." Payette explains that though Choir Boy is packed with music and choreography, "It is a drama with music. The backdrop of R&B and gospel has more to do with the arc of the characters." The characters sing in a choir and sing a cappella "which is a particular level of challenge on its own. Auditions were an extensive process, multiple months, lots of new people. So many exceptional young black performers." He compares the audition process to forming an actual choir and the requisite blending of voices and personalities. "These five boys are awesome triple threats. And incredible human beings blending technique and vulnerability."
 
The final cast consists of Andrew Broderick (Love Train, Erased: Billy & Bayard), Scott Bellis, Daren A Herbert (Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, Onegin, If/Then, Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata), Clarence 'CJ' Jura, Kwaku Okyere (Iphigenia and the Furies, Shove It Down My Throat, The Seat Next to the King), David Andrew Reid (Hair) and Savion Roach. They are charged with the duty of portraying what Payette describes as "young black men, 16 to 18, dealing with an experience beyond their years. With what it means to move from a boy to a man." Payette says that the play by Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight) comes from "the very personal place of a black queer man in the world." Payette praises McCraney's writing as "fantastic, blending a heightened sense of reality with poetry. It's deeply personal and deeply conflicted. How can we survive in a world that is constantly telling us we can't be who we are?"

Payette directed a previous production of Choir Boy in Montreal. Since then, everything has changed, nothing has changed. "In 2018 we were still in the throes of Trump and what that did to black bodies, to queer advocacy." Choir Boy is set in the Obama era but Payette says that an audience "feels the weight of the past four years" believing that black and queer are now "more mainstream" while the politics are simultaneously "more extreme." The central conflict of Choir Boy is that "queer, because it is related to masculinity, is still taboo in the black community." The intersectionality of black and queer is a potent one with a historical line of influential advocates from James Baldwin through to Lil Nas X. But it is still impossible to ignore the oppressiveness of white privilege in the queer community and the world beyond. "It all stems from the uniqueness of what it means to be black and gay in society."

Payette finds that the music in Choir Boy has a similar duality or conflict. Gospel music is derived from spirituals which were a form of "coding to communicate, a place of survival" during slavery. "Does it have to be rooted in darkness?" asks Payette. "It can be expressive of trauma or of trying to uplift. Both can be true." Payette and the cast are still wrestling with the dichotomy, but he proudly announces that the results are "not our grandparents' gospel." Choir Boy was "written almost nine years ago and we're still having these conversations." But the conversations are still necessary. And Choir Boy, and Payette and the triple threat cast, are determined to find the uplifting, the joy, in what it means to be black and queer. And to make the skies open up.