Joe Turner’s Come and Gone review: Misryoum on Cedric, Taraji, and why it wobbles
Misryoum reviews Debbie Allen’s revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” praising Cedric the Entertainer and Ruben Santiago-Hudson while finding the staging uneven.
August Wilson doesn’t usually leave much room for disappointment—yet Misryoum watched a revival that can’t quite decide what it wants to be.
“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” opened Saturday night at the Barrymore Theatre, and the first thing that lands is familiar: the brilliance of Wilson’s world still glows, even when a production around it feels less steady.. Misryoum walked in expecting warmth, humor, and the kind of emotional music Wilson writes into ordinary conversation.. Those elements are here, often in bursts—especially when the boarding house starts to feel like a small, noisy universe where secrets move as quickly as bodies.
What Debbie Allen’s staging gets right is the play’s conversational energy.. The 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house is run by Seth, a practical man offering rooms for $2 a week to people passing through with something missing—sometimes a wife, sometimes work, sometimes a sense of direction.. The tenants, by design, bring sharper edges.. They have stories that aren’t fully told, and that unfinished quality pulls the audience forward.. Misryoum also understands why Cedric the Entertainer’s casting matters: Seth is supposed to be steady, but Cedric arrives with a stand-up cadence that turns the room toward him every time he enters.
That charisma is both an asset and, in a few key moments, a complication.. Cedric’s funny glances, quick entrances, and one-liners keep the show lively, but they also make it harder for the production to hold onto the heavier notes when they arrive.. Seth’s personality seems to precede the drama instead of blending into it.. The play can handle humor and tension at once—Wilson built it to—but Allen’s rhythm sometimes lets comedy run a little too far ahead of the darker turn.
The revival’s central emotional force belongs to Herald Loomis, brought to the stage by Joshua Boone.. Loomis arrives with his 11-year-old daughter in the Hill neighborhood atmosphere, and Misryoum can still feel the initial chill: his hatted silhouette appears ominously behind a frosted door window, like a gunslinger framed for a saloon.. After that first impression, the actor doesn’t soften the edge.. Loomis is volatile, and his suffering is not subtle.. He’s searching for Martha—separated for 11 years—and you sense how the past has turned into something physical inside him.
Where the production most noticeably wobbles is in how it balances warmth and darkness.. Allen’s revival leans toward the comforting side far more often than the threatening one, and that tilt smothers the play’s punch at the exact times it should hit hardest.. The story depends on contradiction: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is both fresh and plainly natural, and also boldly mystical.. Misryoum felt that collision most clearly at the end of Act 1, when Loomis begins speaking in tongues and collapses as if seized by something unseen.. It could be terrifying.. But the surrounding characters move in a way that turns the moment cautious, as if the production is trying to manage the fever rather than let it burn.
Later, when Herald faces a confrontation that’s meant to land with spiritual release, the staging again feels subdued, more placid than pointed.. Misryoum doesn’t get a strong sense of a guiding view that fully commits to the play’s otherworldly qualities.. The mystical elements aren’t just plot devices here—they’re part of the emotional grammar Wilson uses to measure what people carry and what they finally let go.. In scenes of kitchen-table talk, the production’s lighter touch works.. Outside those moments, the revival seems to hesitate.
The design choices reinforce that “come and go” quality, though not always in the most satisfying way.. David Gallo’s set—hanging window frames and freestanding doors—gives the space a built-to-shift feeling, echoing the mobility of the characters.. Misryoum understands the logic, but the result can read as a little flat.. When a story leans on atmosphere, the space should help intensify it; instead, the staging can feel like it’s simply waiting for the next entrance.
Taraji P.. Henson’s presence as Bertha, Seth’s hardworking wife, is another reason the revival can feel mismatched.. Henson delivers energy that’s visibly higher than the overall temperature of the cast, and Misryoum found that dissonance pulls attention away from Wilson’s quiet accumulations.. The final bow for Bertha may be strange in any case—because Bertha isn’t the center of the play’s spiritual argument—but the performance choice makes the disconnect more pronounced rather than less.
Still, the supporting cast is where the production starts to correct its own course.. Nimene Sierra Wureh’s Mattie carries a heartbreak that seems close to the surface, as she pleads with Bynum to use folk magic to bring back a man who left her.. Tripp Taylor charms in a way that sometimes reads as predatory—his guitarist Jeremy is the kind of figure a boarding house can’t fully contain.. Abigail Onwunali, playing a religious woman shaped by her own pain, delivers something devastating at the end, the kind of performance that doesn’t need extra volume to be felt.
And then there’s Ruben Santiago-Hudson, playing Bynum—the standout.. Misryoum’s takeaway is simple: he seems to understand the play from the inside.. He has a long history with August Wilson, and that familiarity shows in how naturally the language moves through him.. His Bynum is complicated without effort: nutty at first, then suddenly wise; down-home and comforting, then shaman-esque; sweet, then suddenly fiery.. Santiago-Hudson gives the production its gravity, and he also makes Wilson’s poetry sound inevitable—like it was written for the voice onstage.
If the revival can’t fully lock in its mystical stakes, it never completely loses the essential Wilson magic.. The play’s spirit—its ability to turn everyday speech into an emotional haunting—is still present.. Misryoum finished the night with admiration for what the cast achieves, especially Santiago-Hudson, and with an uneasy sense that Allen’s production keeps choosing comfort when the story is asking for courage..