The Park Got a Production This Summer. I Need You There.

Outdoor theater is not a compromise. I need to say that first, loud, before I tell you about The Gilded Fury at Riverside Amphitheater, because too many people hear “summer park musical” and think “pleasant but not quite Broadway.” That is the wrong framework. Come with a different one.

The Gilded Fury — book and lyrics by Tamsin Oduya, music by the remarkable Kwame Pressley — is a jazz-age heist musical about a ring of Black socialites who decide to rob a corrupt city treasurer during the 1927 Founder’s Ball. It’s playing under the stars at Riverside Amphitheater through August 29th and I have been twice already. I will go again. The reason I will go again is choreographer Deja Hollis, who has done something in this production that I genuinely have not seen in an outdoor musical in years: she has used the stage’s depth — a full seventy feet from apron to back wall — as a choreographic instrument.

Let me explain what that means. The second act opens with the ensemble split across three planes of the stage simultaneously, twenty-six dancers executing different rhythmic patterns at different tempos in different spatial registers, all of which resolve into a single unison phrase at the downbeat of the bridge. It takes about forty-five seconds and in those forty-five seconds the audience physically cannot breathe. I know because I was watching them. The gasp is audible. That is not decoration — that is Hollis building a rhythmic argument across depth, making the audience feel the arrival of unison as a physical relief, which is also the emotional payload of the scene. I want to be very clear: the choreography is doing narrative work here. It is not illustrating the scene. It IS the scene.

The diva is Celestine Vaux, playing Mirabel, the ringleader. I need you to understand that Vaux is operating at a frequency that most performers only hit once or twice a run, and she is doing it eight shows a week. Her entrance in the Act One closer — a ballad that shifts three times into a belt that the sound designer wisely let breathe without compression — is the kind of moment where you feel the audience tip toward her like a room tilting. She knows it too. She is waiting in the wings for that entrance the way a wave knows it’s about to break, and when it does, the whole park goes quiet first, then LOUD. That’s the sequence. Quiet, then loud. She earns both.

The ensemble around her is equally worth your attention. Hollis has given the corps real characterization — each of the socialites has a distinct movement vocabulary that shows up in group sequences as a kind of harmonic texture. Watch the chorus member on stage right during “Pearls and Powder” — she’s making a choice with her footwork that is slightly more staccato than everyone else, and it reads as character, not mistake. That level of individual specificity in a large ensemble number is not an accident. That is a choreographer who trusts her cast and spent the rehearsal room time to prove it.

Here’s the one honest note, because I have to give you the full picture: the first fifteen minutes of Act Two have a pacing problem. After the intermission high, the show spends a long scene in dialogue-heavy exposition that the production hasn’t quite figured out how to physicalize. Lighting designer Bram Seffert keeps trying to save it with some beautiful cross-fades — the amber wash he uses for the flashback sequence is the most specifically moody outdoor lighting choice I’ve seen all season — but the scene underneath it isn’t pulling its weight. They’ll fix it, or they won’t. Everything around it is excellent enough that you will forgive it anyway.

The Gilded Fury is the production this summer that understands what outdoor theater is actually for: the experience of witnessing something alive under an open sky, in a city that built its cultural identity on exactly this kind of collective public spectacle. Deja Hollis built something REAL here. Tamsin Oduya wrote a story worth telling. Celestine Vaux is going to be a name you know for the next twenty years, and you can say you saw her before the roof went on.

Get to Riverside Amphitheater. Buy the most central seat you can afford. Arrive early enough to watch the crew preset the flying rig for Act Two. Then stay through curtain call, all the way to the end, and make some noise.