The music makes this Canadian Stage production of ‘Choir Boy’ soar

Choir Boy

By Tarell Alvin McCraney, directed by Mike Payette. Until Nov. 19 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. canadianstage.com or 416-368-3110

When this show sings, it soars.

“Choir Boy” is set in an elite African-American prep school and intersperses acted scenes with soaring performances of gospel hymns and pop songs. The expert work of co-musical directors Floydd Ricketts and Dawn Pemberton, movement director Natasha Powell and a stellar quintet of young actors playing the schoolboys makes these frequent musical interludes the production’s highlights.

Director Mike Payette further leans into the power of music by adding sung and hummed underscoring to scenes and transitions.

Those scenes themselves, and the show’s plotting, are not always as strong. The play explores queer Black identity under pressure, a prevalent theme in playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s work, which includes the film “Moonlight” (for which he co-won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) and the “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy.

Premiered in London, U.K., in 2012, “Choir Boy” was nominated for four Tony Awards for its 2019 Broadway run (and won one) and has since been extensively produced across the U.S. and elsewhere. (Payette directed its Canadian premiere at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre in 2018.)

As in his other work, McCraney’s use of language is beautiful and the presentation of contrasting modes of Black masculinity offers welcome representation at a major Toronto theatre (this is a co-production between Canadian Stage and Vancouver’s Arts Club). But the grand scale of the Bluma Appel Theatre does not best serve the play: it’s hard to create intimacy in a space that large and the lengthy scene changes (however enlivened by the music) put even more air in a story that lacks dramatic momentum.

Pharus (Andrew Broderick) is brilliant, gay, and held back by the social pressures and rules of Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys. The play opens with him singing the school song at commencement, a gorgeous rendition by former “Canadian Idol” competitor Broderick that cuts off suddenly and unexpectedly.

It turns out that fellow student Bobby (the riveting Kwaku Okyere) whispered a double-barrelled slur at Pharus, exposing an animus between the two students that the play goes on to explore. Pharus tells Headmaster Marrow (Daren A. Herbert) what happened but won’t reveal the identity of the whisperer, opening up key themes of honour, principle and responsibility.

The production plays into the comedic potential in many exchanges, which adds to the entertainment value but makes it challenging for some relationships to develop credibly: Pharus is so much the witty match for Marrow that it’s hard to understand how authority functions in the school.

McCraney might be attempting a broader comment by making the fissures within this school a microcosm for the pressures on Black communities more broadly but, if so, that aspect of the script could use more development. So too could the character of a senior white teacher, Mr. Pendleton, who comes back from retirement to lead a creative thinking course and improbably becomes supervisor of the choir. While Scott Bellis plays him ably, Pendleton functions mostly as a plot device.

That said, the conversations in his class offer some of the play’s richest material, which the young actors dig into beautifully. What if, as Pharus proposes, spirituals did not in fact contain encoded messages for slaves (or what the character, in a display of McCraney’s linguistic flair, calls “slave escape 007 plans”), but are still of value because they offer joy?

Broderick’s Pharus offers the argument with dazzling conviction, Okyere’s Bobby balks in ways that further illuminate his character and their classmate David (David Andrew Reid), an aspiring pastor, offers more patient counter-argument.

Savion Roach as Pharus’s straight ally roommate AJ shines in two-hander scenes with Broderick, and Clarence “CJ” Jura is lovable and funny as Bobby’s sidekick Junior. A plot twist around betrayal and violence complicates the relationships between the characters and contributes to an ending that’s unresolved in resonant ways.

McCraney did not make it easy for a production team in writing scenes that cut quickly between classrooms, hallways, offices and — most notably — a communal shower room.

Designer Rachel Forbes’ intelligent set frames a central playing area with two two-storey units with balconies that allow for scenes to take place on multiple levels and, memorably, areas for the actors to stand back from the action and accompany it vocally. However elegantly Payette has staged the frequent set shifts, they slow down the action and add to a long one-act evening.

But the songs, the songs. “Keep your Eyes on the Prize,” “Rockin’ Jerusalem,” “Motherless Child” and many more: the cast sings them gorgeously and the stagings are electrifying. Even as high school LGBTQ-focused stories grow more prevalent in popular culture (as in “Sex Education,” “Heartstopper” and “Young Royals” on Netflix alone), the musicalization of this story as well as its focus on Black queer youth is what sets it apart.