Adapted by Pulitzer prize-winner Lynn Nottage, with music by Tony award-wining composer Duncan Sheik, and lyrics by Tony-nominated Susan Birkenhead, Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling novel has been entrusted to illustrious hands.
If this honey-coated production – first staged on Broadway - errs on the safe side in its presentation of the conflicts of the civil rights era, that’s in keeping with the novel’s soothing tone.
But Sheik’s emotive, fresh score defiantly soars above the mainstream.
There’s a succession of clunky opening scenes overloaded with exposition: it’s 1964 in South Carolina and violent single dad T-Ray lives on a peach farm with his daughter Lily, a reclusive teenager plagued with guilt over her mother’s murder, while their devoted Black housekeeper Rosaleen longs for the right to vote following Lyndon B Johnson’s civil rights bill.
Rosaleen is attacked and imprisoned. Lily helps her break free and the two go on the run – a quest to find a better home – trailing the scant details on a postcard that belonged to Lily’s mother, that also features a wondrous picture of a Black Madonna.
Once the two arrive at the magical household of Black matriarch August Boatwright, beekeeper extraordinaire, the show moves up several gears marked by the rousing blues-gospel number ‘Tek a Hol a My Sol'. It’s a fitting tribute to the paradigm of democracy and nest of spiritual enrichment that August shares with her sisters.
The spare set features the outline of a wooden house with a backdrop of long grass. Golden hues wash back and forth, illuminating the women’s struggles against encroaching racism and patriarchal pressures - whether that’s sustaining their honey business or resisting marriage proposals, even if thwarted suitor Tarinn Callender as Neil is charm itself.
These women are all fiercely intelligent, including uneducated Rosaleen, and Abiona Omonua brings an extraordinary guttural edge to her heartfelt solos.
Likewise Eleanor Worthington-Cox as aspiring writer Lily gives impressive definition to internal moments. August and her sisters are highly cultured – literature like Jane Eyre, James Baldwin is referenced and lent out readily. The Boatwright commune propagates that love can be given and protected collectively, and self-worth is a right.
Director Whitney White allows the awe-inspiring music to drive home the humane message.
The Secret Life of Bees runs at Almeida Theatre until May 27.
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