Josephine Baker was an entertainer first — a woman who weaponized joy, spectacle, and provocation to dismantle the rooms that tried to contain her. Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, developed over a decade by soprano Julia Bullock, composer Tyshawn Sorey, poet Claudia Rankine, and director Peter Sellars, has different priorities. It is a discourse on racial discrimination, in Baker's era and our own, and it uses Baker's songs as raw material for a 100-minute meditation that is, by the Guardian's account, more interested in its own seriousness than in the woman it nominally honors. The production assembles serious collaborators. Bullock is magnetic — the review says so, and her record supports it. Sorey is one of the most intellectually formidable composer-performers working today. Rankine's poetry has real force. Sellars has built a career on exactly this kind of politically charged theatrical reimagining. On paper, this is the dream team for a tribute that earns its ambition. In execution, according to this account, the weight of intention crushes the thing it was meant to lift. The musical texture tells the story. Baker's songs are deconstructed, reformed, and — crucially — slowed right down. A riff on 'Bye Bye Blackbird' has guitar and saxophone sounding, the reviewer notes, 'suspiciously like the playout on a 1980s power ballad.' That is a damning specific. Baker's genius was partly her tempo, her lightness of touch, the way she could smuggle a question inside a shimmy. Slowing everything to a processional pace doesn't deepen the songs — it reverses their mechanism. There are moments that work. A version of 'Je t'aime' with a highlife guitar flavor earns its transformation. The episode referencing Baker's famous danse sauvage — in which Bullock dances braless beneath sheer fabric, making some of Baker's grotesquely caricatured 'savage' moves — is called 'properly disturbing,' and you believe it. The reviewer's aside that 'the sight of a woman's breasts is more transgressive on the Barbican stage today than it was in the Folies Bergères a century ago' is the sharpest line in the piece, and it points at something real: Baker's radicalism operated through pleasure and spectacle in ways that earnest institutional theater may be structurally unable to replicate. The score's problems compound: bloated instrumental episodes that extend rather than unify the piece, ear-splitting bass drum and tam tam to flag emotional climaxes, and everyone miked up in a way that works against intimacy. These are not minor production miscalculations — they are symptoms of a piece that has confused weight with depth. When Rankine's surtitled text asks 'Should I be white to please you more?' and Bullock sings it while 'simultaneously accusing us and seeking our approval,' the effect is described as exactly that: accusatory and approval-seeking at once, which is a confused emotional posture. The deeper problem is the gap between Baker's actual mode — transgressive, sexual, commercially brilliant, politically dangerous because she was also fully entertaining — and a piece designed for institutional stages and institutional audiences. Perle Noire is built for the Barbican, not the Folies Bergère, and it cannot help but reflect that. The danse sauvage moment works precisely because it briefly escapes the piece's own gravity. The rest of the 100 minutes does not. This is the UK premiere of a work that has been evolving for a decade. That longevity suggests the collaborators believe in what they've made. They may be right that the subject demands this kind of sustained, serious attention. What's harder to defend is whether this particular form — bloated, mic'd, scored for climaxes — serves Baker, or serves the project of being seen to take Baker seriously. Those are different things, and the best tribute to a woman who spent her life collapsing that distinction would be to notice the gap.
