What better setting than a nightclub full of jazz to tell a story of bargaining with the devil?

One Night at the Blackbird brings audiences to a world of ancient forces dealing to the lively soundtrack of spirited music. In the Blackbird, an otherworldly nightclub owned by Miss Lucy (Aria Jackson), the greatest jazz musicians in the world gather to play. But they’ve been playing this club a long time, and Miss Lucy is getting bored. The Blackbird just isn’t providing what she’s wanting any more. And her long time, ever faithful manager Herman (KC Wayne Simms) is determined to figure out what is going wrong so he can fix it for her – for him, there is nothing after the Blackbird. He doesn’t want to go. So he’ll try anything to convince Lucy not to end the show and let the club cease to exist.

The cast is full of great performances. Jackson has a captivating strong composure as Lucy, her smile never friendly but always unsettling (never in a horror movie way, in a way that lacks deep pleasure). Simms is all exposed nerves as Herman, anxious energy only occasionally superseded by a genuine excitement when he’s sure he’s got a winning idea. He’s balanced nicely by Xavier Rodney as the great Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong, a well established fixture of the club. Rodney’s Satch is cool and collected; he’s calm and relatively unbothered, riding along whatever comes, watching the others with the eyes of experience. As the Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Alexandria Thomas displays a different sort of strength to Lucy’s sharp coldness. She’s principled and sure in her choices. Rounding out the cast as jazz pianist Allen Toussaint is Duane Ferguson, charming and doing his best to keep up with everyone. Michael Hagins’ direction is engaging and, while it never feels overtly stylized, the staging also seems to never settle into being overly natural either. Kat Santomoreno’s costumes evoke the golden era of jazz clubs, and Adam Sherwin’s lights do a nice job of shaping the space.

Overall, Maria Messias Mendes and Thomas Mullen have written a script that is full of character and intrigue. Ultimately, with both the production and the script, the main thing is that it feels like this show could use time just to solidify itself. There’s also an early segment where at Herman’s suggestion, he and Lucy “trade places”, in this case Lucy literally making it so they swap bodies, that seems to go nowhere. It leads to some delightful acting by Jackson showing Herman in Lucy’s body, but it doesn’t seem to add up to more than, as Lucy puts it, “an interesting diversion.” But the script clearly has heart and a lot of potential. It paints an interesting picture of these people and what they’re looking for.

One Night at the Blackbird as it stands is an enjoyable evening. With a little time and a bit of polishing, it could gain a bit of weight that would help add to the atmosphere of age and exhaustion to give this nightclub the gravitas of age.