But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that Intimate Apparel already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry. That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. So is Intimate Apparel. In musicalizing Lynn Nottages play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.īut the sound is muffled, distorted.
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