“Carter’s Way”
Written by Eric Simonson
Showing: Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, through April 27
Tickets: $20-$68
Contact: (312) 335-1650; steppenwolf.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

Tabloid lurid and concentrated like a potion, this tragedy by author/director Eric Simonson is as much musical as domestic. Sorrow set to swing, it’s underscored by a supple score by Darrell Leonard that contrasts honky-tonk abandon with bluesy remorse. The potboiler breaks no new ground but it gives Simonson’s superb ensemble a lot to anguish over, with much of it feeling very urgent as it happens.

The setting is the Planet Mars, a Kansas City jazz club in 1935 where rising star Oriole Carter (a monumental James Vincent Meredith) packs them in with a sound he thinks too rich for recording or broadcasting. Resisting records and the radio, Oriole is married to his music. But he reluctantly agrees with his manager Peewee (K. Todd Freeman channeling Sporting Life from “Porgy and Bess”) to allow radio to transmit his soaring saxophone to a larger audience. But when Carter finds out he’s being recorded as well, he sabotages the broadcast—and his career: He suddenly tears into a duet with Eunice (a very yeaning Anne Adams), a white songstress who happens to be the girlfriend of the club’s mobster “protector” Johnny Russo (menacing Keith Kupferer).

Nothing good can come of this liaison, though Oriole does hear his music differently through Eunice’s unconditional adoration. Eunice triggers the ire of Marilyn (Ora Jones in her finest form), a coming jazz pianist who wants to protect Oriole’s genius—and body—from this interloping floozie. Despite a plot that’s content to let the melodrama play itself out to an ugly ending, one artistic question persists: Can a musician protect his art from life or does his special sound change as he does, not always for the better? Oriole could be on the verge of jazz greatness or have already compromised his style, with Eunice just the tombstone on the grave.

The Planet Mars is definitely on the planet Earth, thanks to the author’s well-grounded staging and acting too strong for these stereotypes. Meredith is perversely pure in his frantic desire to keep his music untainted by his love life. Among the supporting roles, Robert Breuler reinvents quiet menace as a Kansas City mob boss who prefers peddling drugs to records, while the five musicians sizzle in every song.

One historical curiosity: Simonson treats radio and recordings as if they’re fairly new to the music scene but by the middle of the Depression they were the way it’s done everywhere. Carter is a huge holdout from every other jazz hopeful. Overall, “Carter’s Way” remains awesomely authentic to a time and tale that feels more sordid than substantial.