Hire the avant-garde disrupter Taylor Mac to write the book for a Broadway musical and you aren’t going to get a conventional tuner. To wit, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” opens in early-1990s Savannah, Georgia, with several minutes of total silence. It replaces the original authorial voice of the journalist John Berendt (who sold 4 million copies of his 1994 book) with a many-headed audience hydra and ends with everyone in the theater happily ripping apart their show programs on the command of The Lady Chablis, who has traveled forward in time to know she is now being played by J.
Harrison Ghee. That’s not your grandmother’s “Garden of Good and Evil” . And certainly not Clint Eastwood’s 1997 movie, either.
This show, evocatively designed by Christopher Oram, is something new, weird and gutsy enough to jettison most conventional expectations. Like many pre-Broadway tryouts, it has its strengths and weaknesses and a wildly uneven second half of a second act that suggests everyone simply ran out of enough time to fashion an ending that really satisfies. The strengths? There are two.
One is the truly fabulous performance of Ghee as The Lady Chablis, a transgender Savannah performer who was but a minor character in Berendt’s original work, which was an observational, mostly factual travelogue that flowed from his obsession with the people of Georgia’s most interesting city. There’s nothing minor about Chablis’ role here: Ghee commands the stage .
