Dulé Hill Photo by Marc J. Franklin

Although the early years of television saw a smattering of Black actors starring on national programs like "The Beulah Show" and "Amos 'n' Andy," they primarily played characters that would please white racists more than they would please the NAACP. "The Nat King Cole Show" was revolutionary for presenting its star as he was: a handsome, cultured and charming leading man of song.

That distinction, though, was marred by the fact that the show couldn't obtain a national sponsor. The general feeling was that no product would risk losing customers in the south. Ratings were disappointing and though the network was willing to keep the show on the air, albeit in an undesirable time slot, Nat King Cole decided to end the venture after a little more than a year.

On December 17th, 1957, the program's last broadcast included Cole singing a jaunty, upbeat rendition of "The Party's Over," giving knowing smiles at the camera as if to remind the public that the show's lack of commercial success was Madison Avenue's failure, not his.

In Light Out: Nat "King" Cole, co-authors Patricia McGregor (who also directs) and Colman Domingo use that network finale as the background for an imagined delve into the artist's psyche. Seen six years ago at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, this ambitious and unconventional theatre piece appropriately lands its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, on an East 4th Street block that, since the 1960s, has been populated with theatres presenting deliciously outlandish, experimental, bizarre, and thought-provoking works such as this.

It begins quite normally enough. Clint Ramos' set takes us to an NBC television studio, with music director Vadim Feichtner's band stationed upstage and lights signaling when the studio audience should applaud. An unnamed white producer (Christopher Ryan Grant) tries keeping spirits up, but his star (Dulé Hill effectively plays Cole with an off-the-air measured reserve that contrasts with his on-air relaxed charm) appears to be bottling up his anger at the situation.

In his dressing room, the 38-year-old Cole refuses the usual puffs of skin-lightening powder from makeup artist Candy (Kathy Fitzgerald). She gets his anger ("It's just... the South, you know?"), but the producer, determined to stay on the network's good side, pleads with him to reconsider. ("I'm not 'the man.' I'm Hollywood.")

Though Cole was never known for addressing racial issues in public, what might be melting his reticence is a Freudian id in the form of Sammy Davis, Jr., played with excellent mimicry and razzle-dazzle showmanship by Daniel J. Watts. A rising nightclub performer at that point, who had just achieved Broadway star status with the musical Mr. Wonderful, Davis possessed a sardonic comic sense that attacked racism with punchlines. When he quips, "I've got a pool and I can't even swim," it can be taken as a reference to when Las Vegas' Frontier Hotel drained and cleaned their pool after he used it.

The bulk of the 90-minute play with music (John McDaniel provides arrangements and orchestrations for classic Cole hits) is a collage of televised moments from the past year, both real and imagined, with an edgy subtext bubbling to the surface.

Though it's okay for Cole to be a bit flirtatious with guest Eartha Kitt (Krystal Joy Brown), Neilson Ratings lights turn red with disapproval when he gets close to white women guests like Betty Hutton and Peggy Lee, both played by Ruby Lewis. (Remember, this was just two years after the Emmett Till lynching.) The lights are green with approval when he duets "Blueberry Hill" with Billy Preston (alternate Mekhi Richardson when I attended), but watch what happens when Nat King Cole suggests that the 11-year-old star might grow up to be president one day.

Cole's daughter Natalie was only seven at this time, but her father duets his signature song "Unforgettable" with her as a teenager (Brown), foreshadowing how Natalie Cole would release it as a virtual duet with her deceased father's recording years later. His late mother Perlina (Kenita Miller) pays a visit from the beyond to remind her son not to give in to those who would put him down, in between choruses of "Orange Colored Sky."

All the while, Sammy Davis, Jr. pops in and out, a sign of how progressive attitudes towards race relations would start hitting television entertainment by the late 1960s, though Cole wouldn't live to see it (he died of lung cancer in 1965). Though Nat King Cole was not a dancer, Hill certainly is, and the emotional climax of the piece comes with a tap routine choreographed by Jared Grimes. Set to "Me and My Shadow," Davis encourages his friend and fellow artist to ditch his white public pleasing image and use his platform to express his anger at them. They furiously fly across the floor with attitudes demanding respect, without undercutting the grace and artistry within them. It's an exhilarating moment of theatre dance that defines character and situation.

While Light Out: Nat "King" Cole could use some sharpening in the expression of its themes, what's there at this point is an exciting work of theatre that forgoes nostalgia to examine a popular performing artist of the past with the knowledge of a future he died too young to know.