Theatre Peckham’s Young Gifted & Black season continues with new musical The Immortal Henrietta Lacks
“You deserve to be treated like the queen you are”
I have to confess that my knowledge of Henrietta Lacks’ life is very much lacking so the opportunity to find out more about her life story, and through the medium of musical theatre, was a welcome run. Commissioned by Gyenyame for Performing Arts and running as a major part of Theatre Peckham’s Young Gifted & Black season, The Immortal Henrietta Lacks proves a fascinating and engaging work directed by Larry Coke, if a touch uneven at times.
Starting at the end, genetic material taken from the cancer cells that took her life in 1951 became the world’s first immortalised human cell line – the HeLa cell line – and has become instrumental in advancing medical research in an astonishing number of ways even to this very day. No consent was ever given by Lacks’ loved ones for this initial extraction though and this show seeks to rebalance the picture a little – to give us a portrait of the woman, not the medical marvel.
Raine Cook-Clarke’s book thus gives us a snippet of Lacks’ life just prior to her diagnosis. A young wife and mother of five children, life in Maryland is decent if a tough grind. There’s hints of turbulence in her marriage, one of her kids has severe special needs and some days it feels like only the exuberance of best pal Annie May gets her through the day. Because Henrietta isn’t well and is hiding it successfully from most of her loved ones.
Between scenes, Cook-Clarke inserts news headlines which give such valuable context to the storytelling. At a moment where black men are serving in Korea and becoming Major League Baseball players but segregation is still in place and the shadow of slavery looms large over any and all economic prospects. So Henrietta’s choice not to go get checked out at the hospital comes under new light once we consider black people’s not unreasonable distrust of white doctors and the painful reality that even getting to the hospital across town is loaded with danger. What stings even more is the recognition that many of those health inequities persist today for people of colour.
The choice to present this as a musical doesn’t quite feel as successful at this early stage for the show. Promising a melange of rhythm & blues, jazz, gospel and soul, Christopher Neill’s music sits a little awkwardly here. More mood-setting than narratively driven, sultry jazz numbers and swing duets in the first half do little to tell anything of Henrietta’s story. Her big number is as genuinely pretty as any soprano Disney ballad and so consequently doesn’t quite register as right for the time period.
That said, the second half has some mighty gospel and spiritual songs that fully justify the musical format, the choice to cast opera singers Jasmine Flicker and Ronald Samm as Henrietta and husband David making full sense, alongside the rich vocal talents and comic stylings of Orgena Rose as Annie May and sterling support from Charli Gold in two supporting roles.
Dramatically, I can’t help but think that the book could afford to drop a little of the romantic trials and tribulations to blend in more of the social context of what 1950s USA was like for Black people, if only to define Henrietta as more herself rather than the downtrodden wife. For as the epilogue tells us, hers was a story that society (and mainly biotech companies) tried to hide and it is storytelling such as this that is rectifying that state of affairs.
I liked Chris Neill’s arrangement, background feel good before the tragic death scene , it would have been too morbid without the musical first half , very depressing watching her die
Her death was horrific people are monsters took from her body like an alien and disregarded for a very long time now all of a sudden here we are…get out of here…rest in heaven Mrs. Lacks