A Cut Above

Composer David Wohl first came across Margaree King Mitchell’s Uncle Jed’s Barbershop in a museum in Baltimore, and immediately recognized that the award-winning children’s book had the potential to become a musical. Years later, it has: Wohl, along with playwright Ken Grimes and director Susan Einhorn, fleshed out the saga of Uncle Jed, a black barber who dreams of owning his own barbershop, into a full-length family musical. The show, which spans events from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, features music inspired by the stylings of those times as it tells the story of Jed and his niece, Sarah Jean, as she revisits her childhood.

The musical was first produced in New York in 2003 and has gone through many incarnations and revisions since then; the most important of these added the role of Sarah Jean as a child who interacts with her adult self. And the innovations will continue with the cur-rent DreaMaker/Shadow Theatre Company production , in which the actors perform a concert reading from the script. “They’re top-notch performers,” Grimes notes, “so they’ll read with the passion and the depth and the character, so that we can see how the play affects the audience.”

Uncle Jed’s Barbershop opens tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Aurora Fox, 9900 East Colfax Avenue, with additional performances at 2 and 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and 3:30 p.m. Sunday; there will also be a silent auction at 6 p.m. Saturday. All performances and the auction will benefit Shadow Theatre Company as well as Brother Jeff’s mission to prevent the spread of HIV. “Part of the spirit of the show is how the life of the individual and the community are intertwined,” explains Wohl, which is why the creators decided to use this production to support community outreach. Tickets are $23 general admission and $18 for youth and seniors; to purchase them, go to www.shadowtheatre.com.
Fri., May 27, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., May 28, 2 & 7:30 p.m.; Sun., May 29, 3:30 p.m., 2011