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Three-time Grammy Award winner, 16-time Blues Music Awards winner, living blues legend and master showman Bobby Rush has entertained audiences worldwide in a career of more than seven decades, so safe to assume he is easy to spot, particularly at home in Jackson.
And yet, Rush managed to sneak into rehearsals at New Stage Theatre, as cast and crew careened toward opening night of a new musical about him, and hide.
“I cheated a little bit, because I was here when they started, but I didn’t even want him to know,” Rush said, grinning as he pointed toward his co-writer on the musical and the show’s co-director and conceiver Stephen Helper.
Rush scooched down in his seat to show how he hid about five rows back, lifting his head a bit for a peek at the action. He wanted to watch Helper’s reactions, see any changes in the show and judge whether actors liked the script (“You can always tell,” Rush said). But he didn’t want to make them nervous.
Then in rehearsal, the actor playing Rush walked down from the stage and into the aisle, playing to seats yet to be filled, when “Oh!” He found the man himself. “Mr. Rush is in the house, I see!”
Bobby Rush Credit: David McClister
Theater-goers will find Rush there, too — not ducking between rows, but in Rush’s life story up on the stage, from sharecropper to blues superstar with a big batch of his songs propelling the journey. “Slippin’ Through the Cracks: The Bobby Rush Musical” has its world premiere this week at New Stage Theatre.
A $49,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant supported the world premiere production. Visit Mississippi, Visit Jackson, Times Square Production and Hinds County Board of Supervisors are also sponsors.
The show’s title is a nod to the musician’s wits and persistence to slip through the cracks in obstacles such as prejudice, hardship and loss to pursue his dreams.
The show’s run through Nov. 1 is the culmination of a goal set years back.
The inspiration for it came through the car radio as playwright Helper, best-known for co-conceiving the Broadway smash hit “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” drove down the road one day. Rush’s sly and saucy song “Sue” grabbed his ear, made him laugh and set up shop in his imagination.
Co-director/choreographer Matthew Johnson Harris (from left), show co-writer and blues legend Bobby Rush and co-writer/co-director/conceiver Stephen Helper gear up for the world premiere of “Slippin’ Through the Cracks: The Bobby Rush Musical” at New Stage Theatre. Credit: Sherry Lucas
“It was bluesy but really funny,” said Helper, who also recognized a bit of vaudeville timing in the tune. “Its timing is impeccable. I thought if I heard that song in a theater, I’d have a great, great time. That was the kernel.”
Research about Rush revealed a story ripe for telling on the theater stage, and Helper reached out about creating a musical. As he and Rush worked on the project, a partnership bloomed into friendship. New Stage Theatre has worked with the show’s creators since 2021.
“I wanted to grow it from its roots,” Helper said of the musical. New Stage Theatre helped shepherd it along.
New Stage’s summer 2022 workshop reading had actors in folding chairs with still photos projected overhead to set scenes. Even with that bare-bones setup, players’ skills, its powerful story and the score packed with Rush’s songs electrified the experience, for a show that guests lapped up and grooved to.
More than a half dozen actors from that workshop are back in the world premiere, including Mark Henderson as older Bobby Rush. Also returning for the premiere production are Hosea Griffith, Nicholas Patrick, Vershaune Stamps, Joy Brashears Amerson, Jayla M. Lomax and Chris Roebuck. They are joined by Actors’ Equity members Rajeer Alford and Melessie Clark, Jaden White, Grady Champion, Quintin Powell, Joe Tomberlin and Nancy Bigelow Cheney.
Money raised from the workshop helped fund a similar presentation in New York City, which raised money for a production. A one-night concert at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre kicked off that theater’s New Stages Festival in 2023.
“Then, it’s just been some perseverance on my part,” Helper said. Noting New Stage Artistic Director Francine Thomas Reynolds’ interest in helping further the show or do a production, “It’s just taken that amount of time to get a slot,” he said. In the meantime, he fleshed out some bits, and tucked others tighter.
Melessie Clark (from left), Jayla M. Lomax, Rajeer Alford, Mark G. Henderson, Jayden White and Joy Brashears Amerson perform in “Slippin’ Through the Cracks” in its world premiere run at New Stage Theatre. Credit: Destin Benford, courtesy of New Stage Theatre
Premiering it in the South was important, he said, “in the roots, from its culture, from a cast who really knows the blues, who knows Bobby Rush’s music. They are just born with a kind of knowledge that informs the show.” He and co-director/choreographer Matthew Johnson Harris can draw upon that to keep a real sense of authenticity.
“This is the chance to really try it all out, in front of an audience, not on folding chairs but with people who’ve paid money to come,” Helper said.
The setting is ripe, too, because it is Rush’s home.
“He’s an international hero, but he’s also a local hero,” Helper added. “It’s important for a Jackson audience to celebrate its own.”
Choreographer Harris embraced his luck, working on this musical with Rush’s music and the sweep of time it covers. “The nearly 93 years that Bobby has been on this Earth allows me to really use African-American social dancing from the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s, and tell a story of joy and resilience,” he said. It offers a glimpse, too, at the evolution of dance moves, from the Charleston in early juke joint sequences, to a more ‘90s-based Kid ‘n Play move in the second act.
“What I hope to bring through movement and also through, just, cultural dramaturgy, is a love letter to Bobby, to Mississippi, to Black culture, to Black dance,” Harris said, “and use that as another storytelling device to just track time.”
Amid all the song and dance in “Slippin’ Through the Cracks,” there runs a strong thread of resilience.
“Any woman or man in life is doomed to fail,” Rush said. “It’s not if, it’s when. But when you fall and you can get up, that’s the important thing of life. If you can’t get up, have enough strength to turn over and look up.”
At 92, Rush is still learning, he said. “I still have hope. I’m still enthused about the things that I do. And I still would rather do it well enough to make sure that people like what I’m doing.
“Even if they don’t like it, they can say, ‘Well, I don’t like Bobby Rush, but damn, he’s good.’” Rush chuckled, along with Helper and Harris. “That’s all that matters to me.”
Ditto for this musical about a lifelong entertainer.
“It has to be good,” Rush said.
Inspiration is built into his tale of surviving and thriving, wrapped up in and swept along by the folk funk grooves, humor and heart that made Rush a blues superstar.
“If I can slip through the cracks and be where I’ve been, and who I am as a blues singer and a Black man at that — if I can make it, you can, too,” Rush said.
That is a message that has already hit home. Harris, though blessed to work in commercial theater in New York City for several years, still felt “othered” because of his humble beginnings, even in rooms with all-Black peers (some who’d gone to Yale or Juilliard) or in shows about Black lived experience, he said.
Rush’s song “Just Be Yourself” became his mantra and a life goal, and seeing Rush live in concert was a liberation, he said.
“As he was up there, being so much himself, and he ended, saying, ‘If a dirt-poor country boy can make it, so can you,’” Harris said, his own perspective shifted. He told himself, “You are here, working on Broadway and you are thriving and you are a young Black man in 2026. Could you imagine being a young Black man in 1956, like Bobby had to be?”
That “you can, too” line has always been in this show, Helper said.
“But when it’s represented and spoken by a man who can prove it and lived it and had to work around so many obstacles to achieve it … the content of those words is so much more profound.
“It’s a great thought and we all want to subscribe to it when it’s said by you,” Helper turned to Rush, “and hopefully by little Bobby Rush in our show, it will land in the same way.”
Performances of “Slippin’ Through the Cracks; The Bobby Rush Musical” continue at 7 nightly through Saturday, on Oct. 27 and Oct. 29-31, 2 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 1, and at a special 1 p.m. matinee on Oct. 28. Tickets — $50 with discounts for students, senior citizens, military and groups — are on sale at New Stage Theatre; call 601-948-3533 ext. 223 or visit newstagetheatre.com.
