Heads Up

Call it The Millinery Monologues.

When I heard that Crowns, the Unicorn Theatre’s wildly popular new musical, was all about hats, I figured it was true in the same sense that The Glass Menagerie is about zookeeping. Lord, was I wrong.

Clues abounded. The Unicorn’s smart-looking Crowns poster is dominated by the brim of a leopard-print hat tipped siesta-style over a woman’s eyes. The show has been adapted (by Regina Taylor) from a coffee-table book about hats. The stage is bare but for a pair of hat racks so colorfully adorned, they could anchor a gallery installation — something like The Hue & the Holler: Contemporary African-American Women’s Ecclesiastical Headwear.

Soon the actors come out, all of them African-American, almost all of them women, in dream-colored robes and a candy-shop rainbow of dresses. They sing and stomp the sort of down-home gospel numbers that would have made church palatable — hell, a treat — for this sleep-in-Sunday white boy. For the first time in ages, we have a professional Kansas City stage hosting a cast of black actors in a play without Raisin in the title. Even better, the acting’s strong, the singing thrills and the energy crackles through the audience. People clap along, leap to their feet and occasionally even talk back. “Sing it, baby,” a man near me said to Angela Polk, the young heart of Crowns, when she finally got to tear into a soul ballad so deep that I thought we might have to toss a rope to haul her back out.

The opening couldn’t be more exciting, and I was eager to learn about these women and their lives.

Instead, they talk about hats.

Hats, hats, hats. Their significance to churchgoing black women down south. How Sunday service used to be the one place slaves could dress up. How, as Wanda (the excellent Tiffany Jones Sipple) says, “When I go to church, I’m going to meet the king. So I got to look my best.” The five hat-loving stars each take their turns telling their hat stories, talking about having “hatitude,” explaining the difficulties felt by a wife hiding new hats from a husband or that of a funeral director charged with crowning a crinkly, wide-brimmed hat onto the deceased.

Taylor’s script often builds to laugh lines that ring with plain-spoken truth. For half an hour or so, the hat talk is as engaging as the cast delivering it. But eventually the stories run together; a few seem to repeat themselves. Some monologues are affecting — one woman’s trip to a freshly desegregated department store is a joy. But many offer little more than anecdote. The actresses switch characters often and play parts in each other’s stories, which adds to an unfortunate feeling of abstraction: We’re not getting to know these five women — we’re getting to know this type of woman. More electric sociology than drama, Crowns stirs deepest when the stories are finished and everyone sings.

Still, there’s much to recommend here. Polk plays Yolanda, a Brooklyn teen in Wu wear. Packed off to the South after the murder of her brother, Yolanda is skeptical of the hat squad and spends most of the show in a righteous sulk. Even brooding, Polk — with her tender eyes and prickly street posturing — commands our attention. Every 20 minutes or so, she roars to life, singing or rapping or just talking at us. Each time, she’s fantastic, channeling such raw hurt and discomfort that one worries how she’ll hold up over the course of the run.

As Velma, Lori Wellman sings in a voice that’s delicately jazzy, and she savors each line like a slug of good liquor. During her solo numbers, her restraint makes the eventual climaxes more exciting than they’d have been otherwise. She delays the belting, so we want it more. She even manages radiance when trapped beneath a great purple hat shaped like a Super Mario mushroom. Karen Cline Wright is also strong as Grandma Mabel, booming into her songs and offering richly textured mm-hmms at others’ stories. As the show’s one man (who plays everyone from minister to husband to mean high school kid), the enthusiastic Damron Russell Armstrong can’t wash away his musical-theater history — he sounds more uptown than down home.

Taylor’s slip of a plot involves, essentially, the taming of Yolanda. By play’s end, she’s abandoned her hip-hop cap and attitude. At heart, Crowns feels prescriptive, as if Taylor means to warn us away from urban black culture. For all of the show’s talk about how hats let women express who they really are, Yolanda only embraces her inner Bill Cosby after 80 minutes of evangelical brainwashing.

But the production’s good spirits wash away such qualms. In the songs, mostly gospel standards, we hear both the echo of Africa and the history of 20th-century pop. And the hats are marvelous. From the crisp white derby to the velveteen sun hat laden with potpourri, costume designer Atif Rome is a master of Patti LaBelle peacockery.

Director Jacqueline Gafford has tapped great stores of energy from the entire cast, and her blocking is effective. As the women tell their stories, the others who might contribute pace slowly to their marks, each reaching hers just at the moment she must speak. Each song seems more exciting than the one before, and in the full-on sing-and-shout climax, Gafford creates a sunny feeling that had me thinking I should get to church next Sunday.

I won’t, of course. Instead, I’ll sleep late, wondering what Gafford and company might have talked me into if the script were about people instead of hats.