For its high-profile Black History Month slot, M Ensemble had planned to present a provocative recent play, but rights negotiations didn't work out. So, instead, the company has returned to Mahalia, a piece that it presented not quite four years ago.

Though the production boasts an impressive, all-new cast, it has been staged by the same director (John Pryor, whose concept this time is more static) and features the same strong musical accompanist (Ben Collier, now joined by LaKeith Anderson). Musically, the celebration of gospel great Mahalia Jackson's life is glorious. But as with the 2006 production, there's no escaping the myriad dramatic weaknesses of Tom Stolz's sketchy yet over-long script.

Mahalia clocks in at more than two hours, seeming to end numerous times before it actually (thankfully) does. And a remarkable woman's life, unlike her music, gets short shrift.

A STAR'S JOURNEY

Stolz loosely follows the journey of the Grammy-winning gospel star from her childhood in New Orleans to her breakthrough in Chicago to worldwide stardom. In 1950, Jackson became the first gospel singer to perform at Carnegie Hall. She sang at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, at the 1963 March on Washington before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s ``I Have a Dream'' speech, and then at his funeral. She was wealthy, famous, devout and influential. The playwright tries to give a glimpse of Jackson's personality by showing her interacting with key figures like the judgmental aunt who raised her or with her fearful accompanist as the two drove south to become involved in the civil rights movement. Yet nowhere does Stolz mention the singer's two failed marriages, and in terms of the spoken word, the portrait comes off as shallow.

The singing, however, is another story. Whether singing solos or as a trio, M Ensemble's new cast delivers powerhouse vocals.

Christina Alexander is charismatic as Jackson, finding a mixture of praise, soulfulness and jazzy blues in her sound. The show's songs -- My God Is Real, It's a Highway to Heaven, Didn't It Rain, I'm On My Way to Canaan, How I Got Over, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho and more -- are stirring, celebratory and contemplative. All three performers do them justice, and then some. Two actual gospel singers play some of the men and women in Jackson's world. Francine Ealey Murphy is both the disapproving aunt and Jackson's accompanist, Mildred Falls, but it's when Murphy delivers a showy solo version of We Shall Overcome that you really feel her power. Likewise, Johnny Sanders delivers decently differentiated performances as King, Jackson's cousin, a blind organ player and gospel composer Thomas Dorsey. But when he starts to belt Jim Crow Blues, he ascends to another level, one that transcends what his clearly talented fellow actor-singers are able to achieve.

VOCAL MAGIC

The audience never feels or reacts more deeply than when Sanders is working his vocal magic. That's its own kind of problem when the show is titled Mahalia.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.