The idea came in a flash.

Sheri Williams Pannell was sitting alongside friend and fellow artist Cynthia Cobb, watching the production of Into the Woods that Pannell had directed for University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

As Sondheim and Lapine’s remade fairy tale characters sang their newly modern stories, “we thought it sure would be nice to have a Black fairy tale,” Pannell recalled during a recent phone conversation.

Cobb and Pannell joined forces with Parrish Collier, with whom they’d worked at First Stage and Skylight Music Theatre, and Zuri’s Crown was born. A musical adaptation of the Rapunzel legend, it will be staged next weekend under Pannell’s direction as Black Arts MKE’s entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.

In the Black Arts MKE redo, the childless couple of Dewey and Louvain Regal leverage their power as owners of “the only beauty supply store in town” to overcharge customers who are pressured to buy their products and change their hair.

Living next door in the traditional role of the sorceress, the all-natural Larue tends her extensive garden of healthy greens – think Venice Williams’ extraordinary Alice’s Garden on Milwaukee’s northside – while letting “her hair do whatever it wanted to” and resisting the Regals’ repeated offers of hair products from their store.

A junk food addict, Louvain develops a hankering for Larue’s greens after she becomes pregnant with Zuri; after Dewey steals those greens for her, Larue exacts her revenge by stealing baby Zuri and raising the child as her own in a tower.

True to her Swahili name, which means “beautiful,” Zuri (Camara Stampley) grows into as lovely a young woman as her fairy tale predecessor.

And yes, there’ll eventually be a prince (Brian Crawford) in the picture, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If you want to see how this tale teases the original story into a radically new shape, you’ll need to come see it yourself.

An Old Story Made New

The decision to adapt Rapunzel rather than some other Grimm tale was a natural.

“Hair is an issue for everyone, whether you have hair or not,” Pannell said, stressing the broad appeal of a story that will “offer something to every generation and to men as well as women.”

At the same time, Pannell is acutely aware that for Black women like Zuri, the politics involving hair are especially fraught.

“It took legislation to support Black women’s right to choose how they’d wear their hair in the workplace,” Pannell said, referencing the CROWN Act, which seeks to ensure that we don’t forever live in a world where nearly 90 percent of Black women report having experienced hair-based discrimination by age 12.

Zuri is one of them.

Despite Larue’s best efforts to shield her young charge from a world in which such discrimination exists, teenaged Zuri internalizes the message that Black is only beautiful when it plays by others’ rules. Even as those nearest and dearest to Zuri tell her how lovely her hair is, she herself sees its “wild and untamed” nature as a “curse.”

But Pannell and her co-creators resist the urge to construct an artificial binary in which natural is inherently “good” and treated is inherently “bad.”

As in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s WPW production of HOOPS, a celebration of global majority women and the hoop earrings they wear, Zuri’s Crown deliberately refuses to endorse a false choice between older traditions and modern adaptations; it chooses and celebrates both.

Whether through “pony tails or afro puffs, [or] banana curls,” and whether “relaxed, released, freezd or teased, blown out, blown dried, laid to the side, jerry curled or with a top knot,” the chorus says to Zuri, “just strut your stuff” and “show the world what you got.”

“Your hair has a life of its own,” Pannell said to me, invoking a line from the show. “You have a right to wear the style that makes you feel most comfortable.”

Deconstructing Binaries, Building Communities

That generous, all-embracing message is characteristic of this joyous show, which takes a similarly expansive approach to musical genre (ranging from African and blues through jazz and hip-hop) and dance (Pannell noted that choreographer Cedric Gardner has drawn on “many styles,” including “ballet, jazz, modern, tap, ballroom, and hip-hop”).

In a world where everyone wants to take sides, Zuri’s Crown gently suggests that maybe we ought to all try harder to come together and see things from others’ point of view.

Hence even early on, the initially vengeful Larue is already asking herself whether one can ever justify stealing from someone else because they’ve stolen from you. “Oh, Mama,” she cries out to the spirit of her mother at one point. “You taught me to be loving and caring and above all to be forgiving. What have I DONE!!!!”

“People’s emotions are running high because of the stress we’re dealing with, and they respond by resorting to violence,” Pannell said, referencing the proliferation of mass shootings in America.

“We chose in this piece to slow things down and try to see if there’s another way,” Pannell continued. “Otherwise, to paraphrase Dr. King, our ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ mentality will leave all of us toothless and blind.”

That loving, multi-perspective philosophy also informs how Zuri’s Crown approaches the topic of parenting.

On the one hand, it allows an audience to sympathize with Larue’s desire to protect her adopted daughter from an often cruel world. “You will know the freedom to be you without the pain of hatred,” Larue vows as she shelters Zuri from life’s storms.

But can a child ever truly be free if she’s locked away – no matter how well-intentioned and understandable that decision to shut out the world may be?

“That’s our conflict as parents,” Pannell said. “We’re afraid for our children, because the world can be so dangerous and violent. But they ultimately need to make their own choices. As in our show, some of those choices will be good and some won’t. Either way, the best we can do as parents is to just be there for them.”

Pannell has been thinking about this theme and its relation to where and how we live for a long time. It was central to her moving evocation of a vanished world in First Stage’s 2017 production of Welcome to Bronzeville, in which a vibrant 1957 Milwaukee community not only recalled all that had been lost, but dared to imagine what might yet be.

Zuri’s Crown is also firmly set in Milwaukee; its characters will offer the audience Easter eggs galore involving stores and streets, some of them recently gone in a piece which is nevertheless firmly rooted in our own present moment.

We may not be able to resurrect what’s no longer here. But might we remake the world in which we currently live, by forging communities whose members can learn to accept multiple points of view? Indeed, isn’t that ultimately the point of World Premiere Wisconsin itself?

In this context, a story that ostensibly revolves around hair ultimately reaches as far as the mountaintop. For if we could widen our perspective enough to accept how others look, who is to limit how far we might see and how high we might climb, together?

“I want the community to know that this is a universal story,” Pannell said, as we began to wrap up. “Although it’s set in an African American community, the issues it raises apply to all of us.”

Zuri’s Crown opens next Thursday, April 27 and runs through Saturday, April 29 in the Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall, part of the Marcus Center complex at 929 N. Water in Milwaukee. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/zuris-crown-2/.