BLACK BROADWAY !

A Twentieth Century Black Musical Review

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Time: 1900 - 2000 Place: NewYork, NY

ACT ONE
1900 ...The birth of the Black Broadway Musical. The Tradition of African-American artistic excellence begins.

ACT TWO
1920-1935 ...The Golden years of the great early Black Musical Comedies, Cabarets and Musical Revues.

ACT THREE
1935-1955 ...Black Broadway comes of age with the Musical Adaptations, Dramas, and Grand Operas of the mid-century.

ACT FOUR
1955 - 1975 ...Political issues take center stage and the "New Black Musical" emerges as a vital force for social change.

ACT FIVE
1975 - 2000 ... Revivals, Tributes and innovative new Concept Musicals signal the continued success of Black Broadway.

* PROGRAM NOTES *

The First Black Musicals:
CLORINDY and A TRIP TO COONTOWN (1898)

From Allen Woll's "Black Musical Theatre"

Before 1895, Broadway experienced only the image of the African-American and rarely the reality. Stage conventions demanded that white actors in blackface portray all Negro characters in the legitimate theatre. Even plays such as THE OCTOROON and UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, whose plots featured Negro characters in major roles, managed to avoid casting black performers for most of the nineteenth century. In this fashion "real" blacks with dramatic aspirations found all hopes of a stage career thwarted. While a few Afro-American actors such as Ira Aldridge and James Hewlett achieved some success in Shakespearean roles in minuscule stock companies or in overseas productions, drama remained strictly the province of white actors and actresses. 
                       
           Similar restrictions existed at first for musical presentations. From the moment T. D. Rice donned burnt cork and "jumped Jim Crow" in a New York City minstrel show in 1832, Broadway audiences saw a secondhand vision of black life created by white performers. The minstrel show, which featured "shuffling, irresponsible, wide-grinning, loud-laughing Negroes" in a musical rendition of "darky life on the old Plantation," according to a contemporary playbill, became one of the most popular entertainments in nineteenth-century America. Ironically, the minstrel show spawned the modern black musical. As early as 1855 the minstrel stage began to accept black performers.  By 1870, several troupes of Afro-American minstrels, billed as "real and original" criss-crossed the United States with their version of a white entertainment. By 1890, most of the 1,490 black actors enumerated by the census were employed in touring minstrel companies. 
                       
                       
           Saddled with the stage conventions of minstrelsy, black entertainers had to wear the same baggy pants, oversized shoes, and occasionally even the burnt cork that black performers - W. C. Handy, Bert Williams, and Bessie Smith, to name a few - for theatrical and musical careers, but it also forced them to perpetuate the genre's derogatory stereotypes of black life. Since the minstrel show was often the only outlet for black performers, they had no choice.  
                       
           The minstrel entertainments generally played the second class burlesque houses, so patrons of the legitimate theatre did not usually frequent these performances. Instead, the newly popula "coon songs" brought minstrel stereotypes in musical form to Broadway audiences.

These "coon songs" owed their unusual nickname to the efforts of black performer Ernest("The Un-bleached American") Hogan. Hogan composed a syncopated ditty called "All Coons Look Alike to Me" in 1890, and it succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Although the tune is actually a love song of a "dusky maiden" forced to choose between two handsome young men, the public ignored the lyric and remembered only the title. It soon became a catchphrase, and the latest ragtime numbers became known as coon songs. Both black and white composers outdid themselves with these tales of the "gastronomical delights of chicken, pork chops, and watermelon." 
                       
           A black critic found these new songs "crude, raucous, bawdy, and obscene," but they nevertheless swept the nation.The Broadway musical theatre took note of this popular trend, and producers interpolated the new coon songs into their shows. May Irwin became the most famous "coon-shouter" of the stage after the premiere of THE WIDOW JONES (1895). Although Ernest Hogan's hit tune brought him financial security, its title haunted him to the end of his days. On his deathbed he reportedly wished that he had never written "All Coons Look Alike to Me."  Hogan was not alone in this desire. Many black performers had to accept the stereotypes of American popular culture in order to have the opportunity to perform. It seemed a difficult but necessary compromise. 
                       
           Nevertheless, several black actors began to profess discomfort with the roles they were expected to portray. By 1890, promoters and performers began to envision a new type of black entertainment, one that might loosen the rigid bonds of minstrelsy. Change would be cautious, to be sure, since no producer wished to deviate abruptly from the expectations of the audience.

It was in this atmosphere that both Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) and Bob Cole (1868-1911) began to dream of presenting an all-black musical comedy on Broadway. They discussed their ideas and discovered that they had radically different notions of the Negro's proper role in American musical theatre. 
                       
           Cole believed that blacks should strive for excellence in artistic creation and must compete on an equal basis with whites. His musicals therefore had to rival those of white composers and lyricists, and thus demonstrate that the Negro was capable of matching whites in all realms of cultural production. Cook, however, felt that "Negroes should eschew white patterns" and not try to do what 'the white artist could always do as well, generally better."  Negroes should look to themselves for the wellsprings of creativity, developing artistic endeavors that reflected the soul of black people.  
                       
           This fundamental disagreement soured the relationship between Cook and Cole. Whenever the songwriters entered a room, tensions soon flared and insults flew. Friends tried to keep them apart whenever possible. Cook and Cole each went his own way in devising a musical comedy based on his philosophy of black culture. And in 1898, Cook's CLORINDY: THE ORIGIN OF THE CAKEWALK and Cole's A TRIP TO COONTOWN gave birth to black musical comedy.
                       
           When CLORINDY opened to cheering crowds in July of 1898, Will Marion Cook commented, "Negroes are at last on Broadway, and here to stay!" Cook also wrote Broadway's first interracial musical, THE SOUTHERNERS (1904) The critic for the New York Times noted the tense atmosphere on opening night:

"When the chorus of real live coons walked in for the cake [walk] last night at the New York Theatre, mingling with the white members of the cast, there were those in the audience who trembled in their seats, as if expecting an...explosion. It was only a year ago that the entire cast of a farce at Madison Square struck because a single gentleman of color was engaged to play the part of a Negro porter, and held out until the gentleman was entirely cast out. And here were scores of blacks and whites mingling. But it presently became evident that the spirit of harmony reigned."

"The magician was discovered on inquiry to be the Negro Composer Will Marion Cook, who all alone had succeeded in harmonizing the racial broth as skillfully as he had harmonized the accompanying score."

Bob Cole established a black production company for his first musical comedy A TRIP TO COONTOWN, which opened on April 4, 1898, at the Third Avenue Theatre, and has the distinction of being the first full-length musical comedy written, directed, performed, and produced by blacks. Although the show played only briefly on broadway, Cole toured the musical for several weeks and later that year re-opened it at the Grand Opera House in New York.

One-hundred years of glory along

THE GREAT BLACK WAY !

Featuring an All Star Cast of the Greatest
African-American Theatre Artists of the Century !

FANTASTIC

Alvin Ailey

Pearl Bailey

Josephine Baker

James Balwin

Amiri Baraka

Hinton Battle

Eubie Blake

Lew Brown

John Bubbles

Cab Calloway

Godfrey Cambridge

Diahann Carroll

Vinnette Carroll

Nell Carter

BLACK

Bob Cole

W.M. Cook

Ossie Davis

Ruby Dee

Sammy Davis Jr.

Grant Fagan

Andre De Shields

Katherine Dunham

Duke Ellington

George Faison

Micki Grant

Lorraine Hansberry

Gregory Hines

Maurice Hines

BROADWAY

Ernest Hogan

Geoffrey Holder

Billy Holiday

Jennifer Holliday

Linda Hopkins

Lena Horne

Langston Hughes

Alberta Hunter

Mahalia Jackson

Judith Jamison

J.W. Johnson

Scott Joplin

Eartha Kitt

Cleavon Little

ARTISTS

Donald McHayle

Florence Mills

Stephanie Mills

Melba Moore

Bill Robinson

Bessie Smith

Cicely Tyson

Melvin Van Peebles

Ben Vereen

George Walker

Ethel Waters

Theodore Ward

Richard Wright

George C. Wolfe

EXIT to the MAIN LOBBY

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BLACK BROADWAY !

THE GREAT BLACK WAY !

EXIT to the MAIN LOBBY

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Proudly Presents