Imagine if whenever anyone asked you to say a little something about yourself, you had your very own orchestra to back you up. That’s the privileged position in which Ahamefule J. Oluo finds himself in “Now I’m Fine,” the engaging musical memoir that opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater as part of the Under the Radar festival.

Exercises in stand-up autobiography are epidemic in experimental theater. But Mr. Oluo, a Seattle-based polymath of the performing arts (writer, composer, comedian, trumpeter, pianist, etc.), manages to expand the format to dizzying proportions, with a little help from friends who include more than a dozen talented musicians and a glamorous vocalist (the bearded, gown-wearing okanomodé). The standard, modest, one-man confessional here becomes a grand hybrid.

This may seem to smack of hubris. But Mr. Oluo, who wrote the show with his wife, the columnist Lindy West of The Guardian, has an ingratiatingly self-deprecating manner that disarms such objections. His comic style is based in stories that set him up to be knocked down, like the anecdote in which an act of high school bravery on behalf of a bullied classmate is resoundingly rejected.

Such are the rhythms of life according to Mr. Oluo, who dresses like a bow-tied big band leader (but with a punk-rockabilly quiff) and wears a matching air of jaunty melancholy. His Nigerian father left his American mother and their two young children when he took what turned out to be a permanent vacation in his homeland. Mr. Oluo was left with no paternal legacy except an unwieldy African name.
That very name, Ahamefule, turns into another trigger for deflating expectations, when Mr. Oluo meets a Nigerian in a bar who translates it for him correctly. Far worse karmic attacks await, reaching a climax with a near-fatal bout of an autoimmune disease that causes Mr. Oluo’s skin to disintegrate.

There is one story that Mr. Oluo says is still so upsetting that he can’t put it into words, and he lets a string quartet fill in the silence with a brooding impressionistic portrait of this personal Gethsemane. Even with his brass-plump band in full swing, Mr. Oluo’s modernist jazz leans toward solemnity, suggesting a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg.

Though this show’s title, “Now I’m Fine,” might promise a narrative out of the popular “It gets better” school of storytelling, Mr. Oluo refuses to traffic in false hopes. Being fine, he makes clear, is only a provisional state.
But when he conducts his band, his calm, carefully measured, sad-sack comic demeanor drops away. He bounces on the balls of his feet, and even occasionally jumps, just a little, into the air. Music provides the not inconsiderable consolation of at least temporarily defying gravity, in all senses of the word.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/theater/review-now-im-fine-ahamefule-j-oluos-take-on-himself.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0