Tricky Fats Waller pieces cheer crowd at Norfolk State-Virginia Stage’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
Photography by Frank Roman of F.ROMAN FOTOS
By PAGE LAWS | Correspondent
PUBLISHED: September 11, 2025 at 2:12 PM EDT
“Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m sa-vin’ my love for you…”
(singer points lasciviously at audience members and ad-libs:
“and you … and you, oh and you!”)
— “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” music by Thomas “Fats” Waller and Harry Brooks, lyrics by Andy Razaf, 1929
Another, lesser-known song by Fats Waller in the often raucous, sometimes deeply moving show “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” now at Norfolk’s Wells Theatre, advises ladies to — speaking of men — “Find Out What They Like” (and how they like it), and “let ’em have it just that way.” The ladies singing that early 1930s song are talking about, well, sex, but they could just as well be referring to theatrical offerings. That’s what Norfolk State University’s still new Professional Series, in partnership with Virginia Stage Company, is doing, with great success, with its first musical: giving audiences what they want and (judging from the applause) in the way they like it.
It’s one of the most demanding shows in the musical repertoire — no throughline plot, all singing, with lots of tricky syncopation and jammed up, lightning lyrics. It ain’t, in other words, easy, especially to do well.
But Fats Waller (whose parents, according to director Anthony Mark Stockard, came from Virginia) is there in spirit to help, at the keyboard (in the person of pianist/musical director Darius Frowner) and also embodied in actor/singer Darius Nelson, a man of large frame and equally large talent.
Waller composed the songs (at least most of them — songs he made famous as a singer are also in the mix). His favorite lyricist was apparently Andy Razaf, though others also provide words. But Waller was such a larger-than-life performer that his persona still pervades every breath of the show.
The 1978 Broadway compilation hit “Ain’t Misbehavin,” conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horwitz, reaches back to Waller’s first (1925) published hit, “Squeeze Me,” through offerings from the Harlem Renaissance up into World War II (see, for example, the 1943 song about rationing “When the Nylons Bloom Again”). As rich as his playlist is, Waller lived only to be 39, dying in 1943 of pneumonia. But what a life and what a showman — and what a challenge, even for Equity actors (in this performance, all five are members of Actors’ Equity Association).
To say the show is plotless is somewhat misleading, however, when so many of Waller’s songs are themselves mini-dramas, mostly comic, but a couple, tragic.
Let’s look at some of the songs and the five singers, all performing on a three-stepped stage, relatively bare but with a knockout design. The curtain opens to that stage and a naked back wall of the Wells. But there’s also an onstage band pit (for the brass, yet to arrive) and band riser, both accentuated by a spectacular inner proscenium arch made of giant piano keys that occasionally light up with different colors. The design was conceived by Stockard and Rachael N. Blackwell, the latter also the lighting designer.
The show begins with “Ain’t Misbehavin’” performed by the company: two men and three women. Irony fairly drips from the obviously lying lips of a fellow claiming to be chastely awaiting his darling at home while we see him leering at every fair female he can see in the audience. We slowly get to know our cadre of five actors as they split into a duet for Waller’s great “Honeysuckle Rose,” sung by Nelson and Corasha Dent. It’s a love song that’s sweet almost to the point of diabetic coma: “When I’m taking sips from your tasty lips… oh the honey fairly drips. …” ShaaNi Dent (sister of Corasha, and first among equals in this cast) soon follows suit with “Squeeze Me,” a paean to love but from the woman’s point of view.
Photography by Frank Roman of F.ROMAN FOTOS
Among subsequent songs, Gary Kennard Smith is featured in the come-on song “How Ya Baby?” addressed to Starlet Marie Windham and then the whole company. We get Windham again in the silly nautical send-up “Yacht Club Swing,” ideal for Norfolk audiences (world’s largest naval base, Norfolk Yacht & Country Club, etc.), and ShaaNi Dent takes a run at (sorry) the hilarious “When the Nylons Bloom Again.” Later, intermission ends with a rollicking “entr’acte” from our house band, now, of course, full strength.
Early in Act 2 we get a mini-satire of life at the elegant (which is to say, white) Waldorf Hotel. “Lounging at the Waldorf” comically implies that white people lounge while Black people serve. Smith then does a number that intentionally reinforces white prejudices about Black people (as druggies and layabouts): the hard-to-overdo “The Viper’s Drag,” accompanied by lots of puffing on an artificial reefer. And then we continue the series of mini-drama songs, so skillfully wrought, sung and acted: Corasha Dent with the poignant “Mean to Me” — to the back of a silent, surly man (Nelson) clearly no longer interested in her and not sorry about it; Nelson, having amazingly transformed into a drunken, comic, insulting buffoon, with “Your Feet’s Too Big”; Smith and ShaaNi Dent with the solemn “That Ain’t Right”; Windham with “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.”
The Dent sisters join forces for the in-your-face comic advice song: “Find Out What They Like.” This ribaldry is brought crashing down with the most solemn song of the evening, “Black and Blue,” which states forthrightly that Black people suffer psychic wounds every day: “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case./ (Don’t ya know it, brother.) / ’Cause I (’Cause I) can’t hide (can’t hide) what is on my face, oh!” A strong finale is used to raise audience spirits for evening’s end.
The performance I attended had the shortcomings of a second preview: the occasional failure by singers to clearly enunciate the impossibly fast (then slow) lyrics to Waller’s compositions. What this evening of songcraft does achieve is a glance back 100 years to the Harlem Renaissance and even WWII, to see what has changed and what has not.
There’s lots of real misbehavin’ to fix ’round here, but Norfolk State and the Virginia Stage Company are trying their best with this promising, fun and didactic show.
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
If you go:
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; final show 2 p.m. Sept. 21
Where: The Wells Theatre, 108 E. Tazewell St., Norfolk
Tickets: Start at $15
Details: vastage.org