Similar to writer-director Daryl D. Brooks' "Blue Heaven," which was performed earlier at Chicago's Black Ensemble Theater, the theater's founder and CEO Jackie Taylor penned an entertaining and informative musical with grit and depth, "Blue Eyed Soul Sung by Brown-Eyed People."
Both plays went beyond staging biographical Wikipedia-like sketches set to music. They streamed in a second storyline that held the stories together and gave the presentations luscious depth and lasting meaning. "I thoroughly enjoyed it," commented Donovan Anderson of Washington, D.C.
In Blue-Eyed, Chicago-born Taylor flavored the music with The Essences: Voice, Soul, Passion, Humanity, Mind, Intellect, and Spirt, plus the Historians, Oracle, and Instrumentalist to present "soul" music written or presented by people who don't identify as Black. The Essences were the inner workings of a person, with the sum being an aware person.
They were all great singers and actors, but Britt Edwards as Passion delivered some of the best lines, while Tia Jamison graciously embodied her character, Humanity. Interestingly, Jamison is pursuing a PhD not at the Theatre School at DePaul University but at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.