New Louis Armstrong musical ‘A Wonderful World’ sounds its trumpet in Chicago

On his Bronzeville cultural excursions that lead beyond the usual tracks, tour guide and historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas typically pulls up his Chicago Mahogany Tours bus outside a townhouse at 421 E. 44th St.

“This is a private residence now,” he told one recent group, as everyone peered across the street, “but it was also the home of Louis Armstrong.”

Louis Daniel Armstrong, variously nicknamed “Satchmo” and “Pops,” has been dead for more than 50 years and he lived in Bronzeville for only about seven years before decamping for the coasts. But that period in a booming toddlin’ town in the 1920s was a hugely productive one for the trumpet player, vocalist and, eventually, global celebrity.

Armstrong played in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in the Lincoln Gardens at 459 E. 31st St. He made his first studio recordings with Oliver in Richmond, Indiana. And Armstrong met and married his second wife, the pianist and bandleader Lil Hardin, who famously promised to “take the country out of him,” and, by all accounts, was successful in doing so. Along with Chicago.

Armstrong’s years in Chicago also explains the presence this week in a Randolph Street coffee shop of James Monroe Iglehart, a much loved Broadway star best known for his Tony Award-winning performance as the Genie in the original 2014 Broadway production of Disney’s “Aladdin,” a tour de force piece of acting that somehow managed to pay homage to Robin Williams’ vocal performance in the animated movie while physicalizing it entirely as his own.

Like the man he is here to celebrate, Iglehart was fresh in Wednesday from New Orleans, ready to play Satchmo in the new musical “A Wonderful World,” which opens Friday at Broadway in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre in a production with Broadway in its sights.

The show first performed in New Orleans, the Jazz cradle where Armstrong was born and raised. “They were just so glad there to have us around and playing,” Iglehart says, having barely had time to put down his bags and look out the window onto Randolph Street.

“These are the cities that are very important to Louis Armstrong,” he says, staring at the sidewalk as people walk by. “And I know a lot of Broadway shows come through here first.”

In essence, “Wonderful World” is a biographical musical but with an unusual structure formed from the subject’s numerous marriages. “We tell the Louis Armstrong story through each of his four wives,” Iglehart says. “He took a long time to understand himself. And he had a wandering eye.”

Famously so. Satchmo is credited, if that’s the word, with having had hundreds of affairs. In terms of marriages, he was tied to Daisy Parker (”He met her at 17,” Iglehart says, “and who knows anything about marriage at that age?”), Hardin, Alpha Smith and then Lucille Wilson, his most successful pairing. As Iglehart tells it, the show uses these wives to describe four very different stages of Armstrong’s life, from youthful lack of self-knowledge through power struggles and creative explorations with strong, artistic women to an eventual discovery of a loving soul mate. (In the rules of jukebox Broadway musicals about male stars, last marriages tend to come off best.)

The show features a live, onstage orchestra. (Iglehart plays live a little but also has a trumpeting dubber on the stage.) It also stars Ta’Rea Campbell as Wilson, Jennie Harney-Fleming as Hardin, Brennyn Lark as Smith, and Khalifa White as Parker. The piece, conceived and directed by Christopher Renshaw, contains many of Armstrong’s biggest hits, including the iconic “Wonderful World.” (”Hello Dolly,” also famously associated with Armstrong, is not there, yet at least, due to rights issues being as it comes from a separate Broadway show.) But given the length of Armstrong’s career, there is no shortage of material.

Iglehart, though, also says that Armstrong’s relationship to racial issues also is on the table here; Armstrong, of course, was seen by some as overly obsequious to the racist entertainment culture that pervaded most of the era of his success. “I think when you saw him standing next to Danny Kaye or Bing Crosby, he was in many ways playing a character,” Iglehart says, “which is familiar to me as an African American performer. There were some moments in his life when America finally did discover that Louis Armstrong was, in fact, Black. And although he was criticized during the civil rights movement, he did support the movement. He just did it his own way.”

“Wonderful World” is produced by Thomas E. Rodgers, Jr., Renee Rodgers, Andrew Delaplaine, Liz Curtis, and Martian Entertainment (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), and recently added Vanessa Williams to its team of producers.

In a telephone interview, Williams said that she had been very creatively involved with the production and that she intended to be in the theater in Chicago on opening night. “I love diving into the script,” she said. “It’s been fantastic to be able to have a voice and see my ideas and suggestions come to life.” Williams’ hands-on presence also has helped bring others into the project, including Wynton Marsalis, generally regarded as one of the key keepers of the Armstrong artistic flame.

Williams also said that “Wonderful World,” which has origins in a separate Miami production with a different cast, now is looking for the right Broadway theater, competing with several other new musicals for the limited inventory of Broadway houses.

That trajectory is complicated by Iglehart also going into the imminent Broadway revival of “Spamalot” as King Arthur (he said he has a frantic schedule at present, performing in one show and rehearsing another), but it sounds like one possible outcome here is that “Wonderful World” will bow in the 2024-25 Broadway season with Iglehart then returning to the show.

“I have put a lot of work into Louis Armstrong,” Iglehart said, grinning like Satchmo. “I’d like to come back to him.”

“A Wonderful World” plays through Oct. 29 at Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.; 800-775-2000 and www.broadwayinchicago.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com