Heads or tales Crowns celebrates church hats BY CAROLYN CLAY

Far from uneasy lie the heads that wear the crowns in Regina Taylor’s musical spin on Michael Cunningham & Craig Marberry’s paean to church-going African-American women and their headgear. Crowns, in its Boston premiere at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston (through December 23), celebrates the festive tradition of Sunday worship with "hattitude" as epitomized in the American South — to which, early in the show, a Brooklyn teen with attitude-minus-the-h is banished after the street murder of her brother. Yolanda turns up, in the custodianship of her regal grandmother, in Darlington, South Carolina, where she must make the transition from cockily sported baseball cap to proudly worn variations on the millinery mandated by First Corinthians: "But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head."

Subtitled "Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats," Cunningham & Marberry’s tome is a collection of autobiographical sketches culled from interviews, each accompanied by a black-and-white portrait in elaborate chapeau. The material is essentially undramatic, though Taylor extracts the tale of the uprooted Brooklyn teen on which to hang a tale that’s mostly subtext. She drapes the anecdotes, both exultant and funereal, in a rich musical tradition that struts its way from African chant to gospel, the show’s score made up of familiar rousers and spirituals from "We’re Marching to Zion" to "When I’ve Done the Best I Can I Want My Crown." And to boil down the 50 or so portraits of the book, she specifies six women and one man who are both church community and essence of Yoruba deities.

Crowns was commissioned by Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, where it premiered in 2002, going on to cakewalk its mix of oral history and gospel around the regional-theater circuit. There are so many stories related by the play’s hard-working women, for whom Sunday is respite, religious refreshment, and fashion promenade, that the first act can seem repetitive. And at the Lyric, Brynna C. Bloomfield’s two-tiered set, with musicians Evelyn Lee-Jones and Lyndon Rochelle perched above the actors, seems an awkward trade-off for the ascent and descent of the baptismal climax. But costume designer Susie Smith provides crowns worthy of queens (even a few worthy of drag queens), including a cranium-wrapping dead fox for sassy Jacqui Parker. And the cast Lois Roach has assembled makes such a spirited case for both the church and the hats that there’s no doubt young Yolanda, though she spends two hours vacillating between eye rolling and connection, will come ’round in the end — as well she does, abandoning ballcap and rap rhythms on the shore to follow the preacher into the healing waters of the Lord.

Choreographer Jackie Davis supplies little in the way of actual dance, but the cast twirls and undulates where required. And the performers sing as capably as they lay out the "hat-queen rules" and tell tales of the headwear passed down like heirlooms, along with other traditions. Darius Omar Williams, who plays the daddies and husbands as well as the all-important revved-up reverend, boasts an impressive baritone with which he wipes the floor on "Hem of His Garment." Fulani Haynes radiates dignity, Mikelyn Roderick stylishness, and Michelle Dowd earthy warmth and a minister’s wife’s no-nonsense peremptoriness. Heather Fry brings both plaint and skepticism to the lurking, listening Yolanda. Merle Perkins is the most accomplished singer, making an all-out soprano wail of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" that borders on the clownish while remaining fervent. Parker’s formidable women range from the excoriating president of a Southern women’s college to a fire-breathing congregant of the Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church of God. And who knew how well she could sing? Crowns isn’t really a play and it isn’t really a musical, but it’s easy to see why uplifted audiences have taken their hats off to it.