“Paradise Square,” an ambitious new musical heading to Broadway in March, is a fictionalized historical take on the Five Points area of Manhattan and the social forces leading up to the violent Dra…
in March, is a fictionalized historical take on the Five Points area of Manhattan and the social forces leading up to the violent Draft Riots of 1863, where what began as immigrant protests against the Civil War draft turned into violence against the Black population of the city.
The multiple storylines all cohere around Paradise Square, a saloon in the poor and rough Five Points neighborhood , and at the center is Nelly , daughter of an enslaved person and inheritor/owner of the establishment. She is married to an Irishman named Willie O’Brien , who readies proudly to go off to fight in the Civil War. O’Brien’s sister Annie is also in a racially mixed marriage, an emblem of the harmony between diverse communities that forms a frame for the eventual social collapse.
That dancing is the highlight of the show. Choreographer Jones mixes Irish stepdance with African Juba with his own brand of modern motion, incorporating sharp arm movement. The entire show reaches its artistic peak with DuPont’s dance in the second act, filled with intense emotion, fits of humor, and deeply expressive and unique movement combinations. It’s the fusion of influences — an assertion of American-ness — that the show wants to be throughout but achieves only here.
In fact, the leads tend to be primarily reactive throughout. Instead, two other characters catalyze the action. First, there’s Frederic Tiggens , the most purely symbolic character of the bunch, a walking-and-talking villain dressed by designer Toni Leslie-Jones to look like a Monopoly figure. He’s both an evil capitalist and a corrupt politician, and one can only wonder why he wasn’t also made the owner of a newspaper. He’s a tornado of terrible-ness, and pretty much everything is his fault.
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