Our work is supported by Oregon Cultural Trust.
Paradise Blue
By Dominique Morisseau
September 24 – November 2, 2025
Directed by Lou Bellamy
ABOUT
Step into a world of jazz, found family, and the inspiring resilience of a community on the brink.
It’s 1949 and gentrification is threatening Detroit’s Black Bottom, the city’s historic African American neighborhood. Blue, a talented but tormented trumpeter, must decide if he wants to fight to keep his jazz joint, the Paradise Club, alive. When a mysterious woman full of secrets and ulterior motives comes into town everything Blue thought he knew, and his relationships with the people at the heart of the Paradise Club, are thrown into question. Dominique Morisseau’s noir inflected musical drama explores the price of ambition, the weight of history, and what it means to be a people fighting to find their song in a community on the brink.
Recommended for ages 13+
This production includes:
- Experiences of physical and emotional violence
- Sexual content
- Language that is harmful and offensive
- Historical narratives of community displacement and systemic oppression, including racism and sexism.
Find additional details, along with the full Season 18 Content Guide here
Dominique Morisseau and the History behind Paradise Blue
Video courtesy of Signature Theatre
[minicalendar]
PRESS
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
- Kiara Williams: "The production offers audiences a visually striking and emotionally charged experience"
- Rohan Preston: "The gorgeous production completes Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit trilogy in Minnesota and is the finest production yet."
- Anya Capistrant-Kinney: "With Morisseau’s script and Bellamy’s directing, it’s heartbreaking, funny, impressive and ultimately a must-see."
CAST
Pumpkin: Netty McKenzie^
Blue: Mikell Sapp*
Corn (aka Cornelius): Lester Purry*
P-Sam (aka Percussion Sam)/Understudy Blue: La’Tevin Alexander*^
Silver: Cycerli Ash*
Understudy Pumpkin & Silver: Tyharra Cozier
Understudy Corn: Trent L. Berry
Understudy P-Sam: Marcus Lattimore
CREATIVE TEAM
Director: Lou Bellamy†
Stage Manager: David Levine*
Assistant Stage Manager: Kencess Polidor
Costume Designer: Wanda Walden
Costume Assistant/Wardrobe Run Crew: Maia Denzler^
Scenic Designer: Maruti Evans⦿
Lighting Designer: Miranda Hardy
Sound Designer: Gregory Robinson⦿
Fight & Intimacy Coordinator: Kristen Mun-Van Noy
Props Coordinator/Carpenter: Dylan Nebeker^
Armorer/Weapons: John Armour
Trumpet/Music consultant: Noah Simpson
Cultural Competency Consultant: Keela Johnson
Dramaturg: Pancho Savery
Director of Production: Thyra Hartshorn
Head Electrician: Joshua Yoon
Head Carpenter: Brent Hall
Sound & Video Engineer: Saibi Khalsa
Appears as courtesy of Actor's Equity
Portland Playhouse Apprentice Company Member
Former Portland Playhouse Apprentice Company Member
member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society
member of United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829, IATSE
“I’m a Gangster Woman from Louisiana, and I’ll…I’ll Drink Your Blood With My Chitlins!”:
Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue
An essay by Pancho Savery, Production Dramaturg
There are multiple lenses through which to look at Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue (2015). The first lens is to note that this play is the first part of a trilogy, The Detroit Project, which looks at the city from 1949-2008, and also includes Detroit ’67 (2013) and Skeleton Crew (2016). In covering one city over such a long expanse of time, the project is reminiscent of August Wilson’s Twentieth Century Cycle, nine of whose ten plays take place in Pittsburgh. There are also multiple themes that the two projects have in common.
There is the theme of jazz musicians trying to make it in not the most welcoming atmosphere (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom); the theme of a place that serves as a potential refuge for Black people (Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone); the theme of “urban renewal” and gentrification (Jitney, Two Trains Running, Radio Golf); the theme of a musician who dies at the beginning of the play, whose task is to explain his death (Seven Guitars); the theme of a family legacy versus the lure of capitalism (The Piano Lesson); and the theme of a father’s legacy on his son (Fences, King Hedley II).
To point out this similarity is not in any way to suggest any lesser value to Morisseau’s work. The point is that all of these themes are, to some degree or another, in much of African American literature in the wake of the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration. One can call them archetypes of the Black community.
A second lens through which to look at the play is the place, Detroit. At the time the play takes place, 1947, Detroit is one of the major destinations for those who were part of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the South and moved both north and west to escape natural disasters that devastated the agricultural economy, as well as the threats to life and limb from the Ku Klux Klan. When these migrants left the South, they not only took their
bodies, but also their culture, most specifically jazz.
Louis Armstrong had left New Orleans in 1922 to join King Oliver’s band in Chicago, and later made the definitive recordings that can be seen as the foundation of modern jazz, the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions that were recorded between 1925 and 1928. This time period, not coincidently, was also the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement that produced, among many others, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Countee Cullen, not to mention Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
The Harlem Renaissance ended in 1939; and soon thereafter, there was a recording ban because of a musicians’ strike from 1942-1944, and then another beginning in 1948 and going into 1949. This time period was when bebop was being developed, the primary architects being Charles “Yardbird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.
Bebop had been developed out of a feeling that swing music, as developed by Black artists such as Ellington and Basie, had been copied and corrupted by white musicians such as the Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman, the so-called “King of Swing.” Bebop wanted to create music that couldn’t be easily copied and watered down. Parker and Gillespie revolutionized the music by playing so fast that most white musicians couldn’t keep up. As Ralph Ellison notes in “The Golden Age, Time Past”:
“Nevertheless, the inside-dopers will tell you that the ‘changes’ or chord progressions…worked out by the creators of bop sprang partially from their desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians to whom the market was more open simply because of their whiteness” (Shadow and Act 212).
Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill >>>
at Minton’s Playhouse, New York, NY c. Sept. 1947; photo by William Gottlieb
Monk’s contribution was to play music that sounded dissonant and off key, and that was filled with silence and hesitation. Monk was also famous for his hat and beard (listen to Eric Dolphy’s composition of the same name – click above), and for pausing in the middle of a tune to dance in circles before going back to the piano, what Ralph Ellison, in the same essay, refers to as his “hide-and-seek melodic methods of modern jazz” (Shadow and Act 202). The point of all this is that because of the strike and then the ban, bebop could only be heard live in small clubs. The most famous of these was Minton’s in Harlem, where Monk was the house piano player, and where many of the foundations of bebop were established. It has even been called “the birthplace of bop.” (Check out William
Gottlieb’s famous 1947 photo outside Minton’s of Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill – above.) Ellison’s essay “The Golden Age, Time Past” is a celebration of this place, this time, and the music that was created there. He even says that the musicians “thought of Minton’s as a sanctuary” (Shadow and Act 201). Wherever Black people existed in numbers, there were jazz clubs where bop was played. Morisseau’s play takes place in 1949, and centers on one such spot, the Paradise Club, owned by the bebop trumpet player Blue.
The club is similarly named as the downtown strip known as Paradise Valley, where there are multiple jazz clubs. The play’s prologue begins with Blue, alone, playing “a long note. It is the most beautiful note we’ve ever heard” (9)…
Thank you to our Show Sponsors
Thanks to the Regional Arts & Culture Council, including support from the City of Portland, Multnomah County and the Arts Education & Access Fund.
Portland Playhouse receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Interested in Getting Involved?
We are always looking for volunteers as well as apprentices, crew members and corporate partnerships.
