Unforgettable; The Nat King Cole Story
Tim Connery
Directed by Nathan Osgood
Bridge House Theatre
Star rating: 3.5
It’s very easy to forget just how tough life was for black people in the US before the Civil Rights Movement took off – even for huge stars like Nat King Cole.
Tim Connery’s rather entertaining two hander presents Nat (Kwame Bentil) and his second wife Maria (Alicia Charles) unwinding the story of the success, financial problems, racism, a growing family and, eventually infidelity and illness. And it does it with a mixture of dialogue between the two of them, speaking straight to audience and projection specifying date and place. It takes us from 1946 to 1964 and runs for a focused 75 minutes.
Bentil sings well enough to be convincing – always a potential issue when an actor has to represent someone iconically famous. And he brings warmth and simplicity to this man whose life is often made quite difficult, but who only ever wants to be a jazz pianist in the Nat King Cole Trio. He has no interest in politics or even keeping his affairs in order. Bentil does the hospital scene at the end touchingly too.
Charles’s (or Connery’s) account of Maria suggests a strong woman deeply in love with her husband but also practical – the voice of feisty common sense in the background. She wants him to sing more, tour less and stop smoking. The two actors work seamlessly together and we sense the truth of what they’re depicting. Their American accents take a while to settle, however, and Bentil is sometimes less than clear and audible in his attempts to capture Cole’s Alabama drawl.
It comes with humour too. When Cole appears in his birthplace – Birmingham, Alabama – he is hounded on stage by anti-black protestors. Appearing with his trio is the Ted Heath Band from the UK. Someone calls for the National Anthem and one of the drummers plays an introductory roll. The result is both the Star Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen. “Two tunes which do not go together” Nat recalls laconically. But it quells the riot. Venturing south of the Mason-Dixon line was a big issue. So was the question of segregated audiences,
All in all it’s an informative and thoughtful show. But sometimes the budgeting shows. It’s a bit odd, for instance, when Bentil takes off his shirt and says he’s fetching a clean one but, actually, puts back on the one he’s just taken off.
