Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- For several weeks, now, Montego Glover and Chad Kimball have been singing the blues -- some lowdown, all high spirited -- in “Memphis,” the season’s most unabashedly feel-good musical.

Named for the Tennessee city that can stake a credible claim as the birthplace of rock n’ roll, “Memphis” took six years and four separate iterations to get to New York. It’s a winning combination of well-intentioned parable (think “Hairspray”) and old-fashioned bittersweet romance (think “A Star is Born”).

The songs, by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, deftly recall the blues in rock’s DNA. Most critics, including Bloomberg’s John Simon, were more than pleasantly surprised. (The New York Times’s man on the aisle gave it a wounding thumbs-down.) More importantly, “Memphis” has great word of mouth, without which no Broadway show can succeed.

Much credit for that belongs to the irresistible leads: Kimball, as a young white man with blues in his soul, and Glover, as the young black singer he falls in love with and launches to stardom.

Their comfort level together is palpable as they navigate a story that takes them from a tentative first meeting in an underground blues club to the affair that inevitably leads to a scene of brief but shocking violence and an ending that refuses to tie up loose ends too neatly.

Comfort Level

So it’s little surprise that, along with half a dozen other members of the company, Kimball, 33, and Glover, 35, have been with “Memphis” from its first outing six years ago in Chicago. They may not be a couple in real life, but they fake it extraordinarily well.

Glover, who speaks with her hands and eyes as much as her mouth and has a quick, girlish laugh, recalled the auditions, during a joint interview with her co-star one recent afternoon at the Shubert.

“We go down the hall and we read,” she said. “It was a scene with kissing, and so we read the scene and we kissed and we pulled away and I looked at him. I said, ‘Hi!’ and he said, ‘Hi!’ and I thought, ‘This is the guy.’”

“And you were thinking, ‘He’s the best kisser ever,’” Kimball added, prompting that laugh from his co-star.

True Stories

Though loosely based on the legendary Memphis radio disc jockey Dewey Phillips, Kimball’s character, Huey Calhoun, is mostly a product of musical theater fantasy. He’s an outsider who only finds himself when he takes over a local radio station and then TV show to promote what was called, at the time, race music.

Huey falls in love with Felicia Farrell, and when she leaves for New York and fame, he makes the more complicated decision to stay with his first love, the city.

Over the years Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book and collaborated with Bryan on the lyrics, kept tinkering with Huey’s character to find the right balance between lovable fool and tragic hero.

“There have been drafts where people came away really not liking him -- and there have been drafts where people came away maybe liking him more than they should,” Kimball said. “I love where it goes, because I think it’s a story most people can relate to. He has his rise, he’s gotta fall -- and he falls hard.”

Southern Charm

Glover, who just bought a house in Brooklyn, comes by her Southern charm honestly, having been reared in Chattanooga. Kimball is from Seattle but adds almost sheepishly that he sang in church and with his high school jazz ensemble. It’s Felicia who steps outside the predictable narrative arc by leaving the man she loves when opportunity calls. Glover loves that decision.

“As a woman, as an artist -- especially, frankly as a black singer -- she doesn’t have a choice,” Glover said. “Part of growing up for Felicia is making the tough decisions. It’s a product of her having to live on both sides of the line, which any person of color living in this country has to come to grips with. For her, moving to New York means growth. Growth with a cost.”

The audience seems to agree, cheering Felicia as heartily as Huey when the curtain falls, one last surprise in a show full of them.

“Nobody comes in with any expectations, they’ve never heard of the show,” Kimball said. “The audience makes this show so much fun to do because their reaction is so honest, so exuberant.”

For information on “Memphis,” call +1-212-239-6200 or go to http://www.memphisthemusical.com.

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor and critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 17, 2009 00:00 EST