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Jumbo examines the matter through the perspectives of two strikingly similar women. The first is Josephine Baker. The African-American dancer-singer was born in poverty in St. Louis but escaped to success in New York before attaining superstardom in France, and realizing, in the first half of the 1900s, that racial politics meant she couldn't be the star in America that she could in Europe. (She was, for example, unwilling to appear in theaters where black musicians, stagehands, and audiences were not welcomed.) Though her skill and tenacity, and sweeping societal shifts, eventually elevated her to American fame, her high-living lifestyle and push for equality on other fronts ensured that she knew no shortage of heartbreak along the way. Baker's travails cleared the path for Jumbo's second subject: Jumbo herself. Though, like Baker, she's a woman of color who discovered performing at an early age, her being born in the U.K. meant that finding the kind of success she wanted required expanding her own horizons—including to America, and a potentially lucrative job on an L.A.-based crime TV series. But her love for her environmental activist boyfriend, and her own insecurities, make what may seem like a sure thing anything but. This is not, however, a traditional "now and then" kind of outing. The parallels Jumbo draws between her past inspiration and her present self are rarely italicized and never strained; she doesn't pretend that her own story tracks directly with Baker's. More of a stream-of-consciousness roller coaster than a crisply pressed bioplay, Josephine and I flips between the women at will, sometimes within a sentence or even a thought. Jumbo summons Baker through the recordings she watched of her performances, Baker dissolves back to Jumbo when she boards the ship for France, and so on. All of this happens with a quickly moving fluidity that the writing necessitates, but that finds its full expression under the helming of director Phyllida Lloyd. The scenic and costume design, by Anthony Ward, finds a fine, humorous balance between opulent spectacle and penny-pinching cabaret, a quality that is only augmented by Kate Ashton's lights, Will Pickens's sumptuously natural sound design, and Ravi Deepres's lively projections and film clips. Eventually, everything must come back to Jumbo, so it helps that she's excellent in both roles. Though she's perhaps best known in this country for starring opposite Hugh Jackman in The River on Broadway earlier this season, Jumbo has a much wider skill set than she was allowed to demonstrate there. Though she has a serene sense of focus that draws you into her most vexing interior struggles, most notably during the slow-motion disintegration of Baker that consumes much of the final third of the evening, Jumbo's way with comedy is so deft that she can leave you laughing a second later, with hardly so much as a change in facial expression. If Jumbo is not a rafter-raising vocalist, her singing is firm, determined, and characterful, and serves her beautifully in the small selection of sampled Baker tunes. And her lithe physicality and keen dance chops let her invoke Baker's uninhibited sexuality without breaking a literal or figurative sweat. If Josephine and I has a failing, it's that Jumbo hasn't quite trusted herself enough. She relies a bit too heavily on cute devices to jump-start or re-energize the narrative; a toy doll, painted black, provides a rickety entrée into Baker's psychology, and not all of the cross-linking "plot" points convince as the spontaneous occurrences they're intended to be. Watching one legend through the eyes of (maybe) another in the making is rewarding and substantial enough by itself. In this respect, Jumbo could stand to learn from Baker's stalwart example. Not coincidentally, that's also very much the point of the show: how two personalities who couldn't have met can fuse into one to carry on the line of progress down to the generation to come. When the two women come together in the finale, it's in a seamless expression of artistry that chills and thrills in roughly equal measure, with two unique talents realizing, unwittingly, just what the other has to offer. Even if you're familiar with what Baker endured and created, the ingenuity with which Jumbo puts it forth give it a glimmering new gloss that will justifiably help her, her message, and her avatar here, find their rightful home in the future, as well.
Josephine and I
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