Carter's Way

If Charlie Trotter announced that his next enterprise were to be a theme restaurant—one in which the decor were mock 1930s gin joint, the staff dressing like penny-ante pimps and gun molls and speaking to the customers in Cagney slang, while a tribute band sat in the corner trying earnestly to recreate the authentic sounds of Depression-era jazz—everyone would fear the marquee-name chef had gone batty. Yet in the case of Carter’s Way, Eric Simonson’s play about an unlucky saxophonist who tangles with a gangster’s girl in 1935 Kansas City, all the aforementioned gaudy trappings that make theme-restaurant culture a joke find their way, in utter seriousness, onto the stage of Steppenwolf, the Trotters of our theater scene.

Although Simonson is dogged in his devotion to the most underrated of America’s jazz meccas—he deliberately draws characters analogous to the city’s notorious personalities in the emerging black-and-tan culture— Carter’s Way mostly relies on boilerplate bromides. The mob boss’s girlfriend (Adams) wants to be a singer, and the lead racism-enduring horn player (red-meaty Meredith) lives in a moth-eaten dump with only a ratty mattress, while the sensible woman in his life (Jones), a piano player and arranger of tunes, just wants to take care of her mother. The underlying intentions of all contributing parties are swooningly romantic, but somehow that’s clouded everyone’s judgment.

Neil Patel’s set is stunningly voluminous, but more pretty than gritty, while Darrell Leonard’s near-accurate music hints at the real thing while reminding you it’s not. And though the performances give the show dignity—any night Ora Jones and James Meredith act is a good night to go to the theater—the overall effect is less black-and-tan than tacky and bland.