Heady Stuff

The first time around, last spring, Crowns seemed like too much head squeezed into too little hat. The compact Unicorn Theatre is ideally proportioned for plays itemizing all the things humanity gets wrong, but no so much for this huge, good-time gospel musical. The show is a proudly one-note affair that offers, according to its subtitle, Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. This may sound dry, and sometimes it was dry, especially those monologues about getting all Imelda Marcos with 200 hats that have to be hidden from husbands. But every night, by the time Crowns hit its clap-along, stomp-along, stand-up-or-look-like-an-asshole finale, it was so swollen with joy that it almost lifted audiences right to heaven or Zion or Broadway.

Almost. First we would have had to bust through that leaky Unicorn roof.

Now, Crowns has ascended to the Gem Theater, in the heart of the 18th and Vine district, itself a realm more sustained by ritualistic belief than concrete evidence. Here, the play has all the room in the world to swell up and testify. Here, Angela Polk and Davita J. Wesley Vaughn can belt their joyful noise without worrying about afflicting the front rows with tinnitus, and the five-member ensemble can sing for the rafters without fear of rattling them. Here, the crowd can leap and groove and holler back without wondering: “Are we allowed to do this here?”

In short, Crowns still reigns. As it did last spring, the show gets by almost entirely on hats, voices and spirit. But it’s still too talky.

Inspired by a coffee-table book celebrating the ostentatious hats beneath which certain black women peacock to church, the show is an oversized book itself: lavish in presentation, a great pleasure to idle with for a few minutes, but meager beneath the gloss. The dialogue could often serve as captions to photos of hats. For example, 35 minutes in: “I lend my children but not my hats.” Or, at 58 minutes: “I wear hats every Sunday because I want to set an example.” At 82 minutes: “Lordy, where did you get that hat?”

A few compelling stories break it up, and author Regina Taylor sometimes tries to put it all in some broader social context, but at the 40-minute mark, Victoria Barbee has to muster all of her deep charm to smooth us past the laziest transition in recent theater history: “Now, you talk about a lady and hats,” she says, before proceeding to do just that. I sat there thinking, Could you please tell us about something else? Your life? Your faith? Your cats, even?

Thank God, then, that the cast members sing almost as much as they talk. This doesn’t just save the show; moments such as Vaughn stomping out a beat as she digs into some deep gospel make Crowns almost great. In solo numbers, Wellman’s singing is relaxed but refined, surging at times with a rush of sudden power, and Polk’s is raw enough to sand down a board, often heartbroken or angry but capable of brawling joy. The ensemble passages ring out like church bells. Again, by the end, the show takes flight. This time it has some headroom.