Review: Marley’s music can’t keep ‘Three Little Birds’ aloft - St. Paul Pioneer Press

Bob Marley deserves his own jukebox musical. The Jamaican singer-songwriter was the genius of reggae, one who consistently found innovative, imaginative ways to stretch the structures of his genre. Atop that music he layered lyrics that spoke of his experiences in a poverty-stricken and often conflict-riven country, yet made sure listeners never lost sight of hope and joy.

When the musical that does justice to Marley arrives, I hope that it will be more rich and rewarding than “Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds,” which is currently being presented at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. It’s a breezy but way too insubstantial piece of theater, one hour of pretty well-played Marley music that may serve to turn children on to old-school roots reggae – and I’m all for that – but deprives them of any kind of engaging story.

I came away from Friday’s opening night feeling as if I’d just experienced something semi-improvised, each slice of spoken text a hastily assembled bridge to the next Marley song, which often had the thinnest of connections to the action. It felt like a collision between two separate endeavors that never found common ground: Adapting a very simple children’s book by Cedella Marley, one of Bob’s daughters, and giving a sense of the greatness of his music.

Despite some strong performances, “Three Little Birds” has a decidedly disheveled feel. While some may come away assuming that the Jamaican accents and slang were responsible for their being confounded by this musical, they’d probably still be trying to decipher its central conflict and point if they understood every word.

In what story there is, Ziggy is an 11-year-old boy whose experience with a hurricane has convinced him to become a risk-averse couch potato. Despite the pleadings of his mother and a girl with a mad crush on him, he doesn’t want to go out. When the bird with whom he regularly converses convinces him to go on an adventure, he encounters a villainous mythological figure who wants Ziggy’s hair. Oh, and… There’s a brief lesson about the history of Jamaica.

And there’s music. Plenty of it. But, no matter how great the songs – which have some of their rockier edges sanded down by music director Sanford Moore – it’s hard to escape the feeling that music and story have little to do with one another here. It doesn’t help that there’s a lot going on in your typical Marley song that’s not easily simplified or adapted to a children’s tale. And vacuuming all of the politics and religion out of Marley’s music feels disrespectful, leaving behind head-scratching adapter’s decisions like “Natural Mystic” becoming a villain’s anthem or “Is This Love?” erupting upon a pre-adolescent first kiss.

While director Sha Cage may have done as much as she could with this clash-filled combination, few onstage seem confident about the strength of the material. The most obvious exception is KateMarie Andrews as Ziggy’s trickster friend, Nansi. In what’s evidently her first professional role, Andrews intuits that this show could use some playfulness, energy and a touch of hamminess, and she steals many a scene. And, as Ziggy’s wise guide of a pet bird, Nathan Barlow deserves credit for tapping into the soul in Marley’s sound, which was always firmly rooted in American rhythm and blues.

While neither the set nor costumes are eye-popping enough to awaken the rods and cones that lay dormant in your eyes during a dreary Minnesota January, choreographer Alanna Morris-Van Tassel’s dance numbers deliver warmth and joy, clearly engaging the multi-generational audience. In fact, I sometimes got the impression that many patrons would rather be singing and dancing at a spirited reggae concert than trying to make sense of this story.