You have to admire Todrick Hall’s ambition. The YouTube star and veteran of five Broadway shows and several reality TV programs has the rare distinction of directing, choreographing, writing the book, music, and lyrics, producing and playing the lead role in a new Off-Broadway musical Midnight. Just getting an original show with a cast of 20 up and running is a difficult feat in today’s challenging theatrical economy and Hall deserves full marks for that. However, the production itself could have benefitted for at least one more set of eyes and a red pencil. Clocking in at close to three hours, this musical fantasy on race relations and suppressed gay love is too long, monotonous and self-indulgent. There are impactful and well-performed individual moments, but they are drowned in a sea of excess.
Todrick Hall and Jeremy Beloate
in Midnight.
Credit: Valerie Terranova
Hall’s premise is intriguing and the opening number sets the stage for a promising evening. A huge clock is suspended above the stage (Morgan Large designed the imaginative set) as well as several mannequins sporting Beck Jones’ gorgeous and elaborate costumes. The cast consisting of an equal number of white and African-American performers enters in rehearsal clothes, the mannequins descend, and the actors sing of assuming identities as they don Civil War-era garb defining their roles along racial lines.
The subsequent story follows a slave named Rail (Hall)—his monicker derives from his birth near train tracks—and his illicit same-sex affair with the white landowner and master Richard (The Voice finalist Jeremy Beloate). Their clandestine trysts occur at the titular hour, thus the ominous timepiece dominating the action. Hall’s direction moves the action along swiftly and engagingly (aided greatly by Jake DeGroot’s dynamic lighting) and many of Hall’s songs are soaring and effective, but the characters act as if it’s 2026 instead of 1862. Would black slaves really serve their white enslavers a dead mouse on top of the dessert? (The move was probably inspired by Octavia Spencer’s character’s hilarious act of gastronomic revenge against her white employer in The Help.) Would a white Southern landowner really encourage black slaves and white workers to treat each other as equals while the Civil War raged?
