All-Black Cast

Broadway shows

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A

Ain’t Misbehavin’ (musical)
Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a musical revue with a book by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr., and music by various composers and lyricists as arranged and orchestrated by Luther Henderson. It is named after the song by Fats Waller (with Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf), “Ain’t Misbehavin'”.

The musical is a tribute to the black musicians of the 1920s and 1930s who were part of the Harlem Renaissance, an era of growing creativity, cultural awareness, and ethnic pride, and takes its title from the 1929 Waller song “Ain’t Misbehavin'”. It was a time when Manhattan nightclubs like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom were the playgrounds of high society and Lenox Avenue dives were filled with piano players banging out the new beat known as swing. Five performers present an evening of rowdy, raunchy, and humorous songs that encapsulate the various moods of the era and reflect Waller’s view of life as a journey meant for pleasure and play.

B

Bandanna Land
Bandanna Land (also known as In Bandanna Land) (1908) is a musical with a book and lyrics were written by Jesse A. Shipp, and Alex Rogers, respectively, and music composed primarily by Will Marion Cook. Created by and featuring African Americans, it was the third musical written by the team whose previous works included In Dahomey (1902) and Abyssinia (1906). It was the last show featuring the duo of Bert Williams and George Walker, comedians who starred in these musicals. (Walker became ill during the post-Broadway tour and died in 1911).

Black Nativity
Black Nativity is a retelling of the classic Nativity story with an entirely black cast. Traditional Christmas carols are sung in gospel style, with a few songs created specifically for the show. Originally written by Langston Hughes, the show was first performed Off-Broadway on December 11, 1961, and was one of the first plays written by an African American to be staged there. The show had a successful tour of Europe in 1962, one of its appearances being at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Black Nativity has been performed annually in Boston, Massachusetts at various locations, such as the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, Boston Opera House, Tremont Temple, Roxbury Community College, Northeastern’s Blackman Auditorium, and presently at Emerson College’s Paramount Theater since 1969 & is considered the longest-running production of Langston Hughes’ “Black Nativity.” The original 160 singers were arranged by age group and vocal range, with an assortment of soloists, along with the narrator, and Mary and Joseph, who are both mute, as well as musicians & ASL interpreters.

The original name for this play was Wasn’t It a Mighty Day? Alvin Ailey was a part of the original Off-Broadway cast, but he and Carmen de Lavalladedeparted from the show prior to its opening, in a dispute over the title being changed to Black Nativity

Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk
Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk is a musical that debuted Off-Broadway at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater in 1995 and moved to Broadway in 1996. The show was conceived and directed by George C. Wolfe, and featured music by Daryl Waters, Zane Mark, and Ann Duquesnay; lyrics by Reg E. Gaines, George C. Wolfe and Ann Duquesnay; and a book by Reg E. Gaines. The choreography was by Savion Glover.

C

Cabin in the Sky (musical)
Cabin in the Sky is a musical with music by Vernon Duke, book by Lynn Root, and lyrics by John Latouche. The musical opened on Broadway in 1940. The show is described as a “parable of Southern Negro Life with echoes of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (which would be turned into the musical Carousel) and Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures.

Carmen Jones
Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical with music by Georges Bizet (orchestrated for Broadway by Robert Russell Bennett) and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II which was performed at The Broadway Theatre. Conceptually, it is Bizet’s opera Carmen updated to a World War II-era African-American setting. (Bizet’s opera was, in turn, based on the 1846 novella by Prosper Mérimée.) The Broadway musical was produced by Billy Rose, using an all-black cast, and directed by Hassard Short. Robert Shaw prepared the choral portions of the show.

The original Broadway production starred Muriel Smith (alternating with Muriel Rahn) in the title role. The original Broadway cast members were nearly all new to the stage; Kennedy and Muir write that on the first day of rehearsal only one member had ever been on a stage before.

The 1954 film was adapted by Hammerstein and Harry Kleiner. It was directed by Otto Preminger and starred Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.

The musical has also been revived in London, running for a season in 1991 at London’s Old Vic and most recently in London’s Royal Festival Hall in the Southbank Centre in 2007.

In 2018, it was revived off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company under the direction of John Doyle and Anika Noni Rose in the title role.

 

Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk

Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk is a one-act musical by composer Will Marion Cook and librettist Paul Laurence Dunbar.

The piece premiered in 1898 and was the first Broadway musical with an all-black cast. It starred the famous African-American performer Ernest Hogan. Popular songs from the show included “Who Dat Say Chicken In Dis Crowd” (one of the first documented uses of the well-known “Who Dat?” comedy motif) and the finale, “Darktown Is Out Tonight”.

The Color Purple (musical)
The Color Purple is a musical with a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray. Based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker and its 1985 film adaptation, the show follows the journey of Celie, an African-American woman in the American South from the early to the mid-20th century.

The original Broadway production ran from 2005 to 2008, earning eleven Tony Award nominations in 2006. An enthusiastically acclaimed Broadway revival opened in late 2015 and ran through early 2017, winning two 2016 Tony Awards—including Best Revival of a Musical.

D

Dreamgirls
Dreamgirls is a Broadway musical, with music by Henry Krieger and lyrics and book by Tom Eyen. Based on the show business aspirations and successes of R&B acts such as The Supremes, The Shirelles, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and others, the musical follows the story of a young female singing trio from Chicago, Illinois called “The Dreams”, who become music superstars.

Staged with a mostly African-American cast and originally starring Jennifer Holliday, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Loretta Devine, Ben Harney, Cleavant Derricks, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Obba Babatundé, the musical opened on December 20, 1981, at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. The musical was then nominated for 13 Tony Awards, including the Tony Award for Best Musical, and won six. It was later adapted into a motion picture from DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures in 2006. The film starred Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose, and Keith Robinson.

E

Eclipsed (play)
Eclipsed is a play written by Danai Gurira. (Not to be confused with the play Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan about life in a Magdalene Laundry in 1960s Ireland) It takes place in 2003 and tells the story of five Liberian women and their tale of survival near the end of the Second Liberian Civil War. It became the first play with an all-black and female creative cast and team to premiere on Broadway.

Eclipsed premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company[1] in Washington, DC in 2009, then opened Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in October 2015 with positive reviews and ran until November 2015. The following year, it transferred to Broadway, premiering at the John Golden Theatre with an opening on March 6, 2016. Its Broadway run closed on June 19, 2016.

The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O’Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.

Originally called The Silver Bullet, the play is one of O’Neill’s major experimental works, mixing expressionism and realism, and the use of an unreliable narrator and multiple points of view. It was also an oblique commentary on the U.S. occupation of Haiti after bloody rebellions there, an act of imperialism that was much condemned in O’Neill’s radical political circles in New York.  The Emperor Jones draws on O’Neill’s own hallucinatory experience hacking through the jungle while prospecting for gold in Honduras in 1909,[3] as well as the brief, brutal presidency of Haiti’s Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.[4]

The Emperor Jones was O’Neill’s first big box-office hit. It established him as a successful playwright after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his first play, the much less well-known Beyond the Horizon (1920). The Emperor Jones was included in Burns Mantle’s The Best Plays of 1920–1921.

F

Fences (play)
Fences is a 1985 play by American playwright August Wilson. Set in the 1950s, it is the sixth in Wilson’s ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle”. Like all of the “Pittsburgh” plays, Fences explores the evolving African-American experience and examines race relations, among other themes. The play won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play. The play was first developed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 1983 National Playwrights Conference and premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985.

Four Saints in Three Acts
Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera by American composer Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Written in 1927-8, it contains about 20 saints and is in at least four acts. It was groundbreaking for form, content, and its all-black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director, and supported by her choir.

Thomson suggested the topic, and the libretto as delivered can be read in Stein’s collected works. The opera features two 16th-century Spanish saints—the former mercenary Ignatius of Loyola and the mystic Teresa of Avila—as well as their colleagues, real and imagined: St. Plan, St. Settlement, St. Plot, St. Chavez, etc. Thomson decided to divide St. Teresa’s role between two singers, “St. Teresa I” and “St. Teresa II”, and added the master and mistress of ceremonies (Compère and Commère—literally, the “godparents”) to sing Stein’s stage directions.

H

The Hot Mikado (1939 production)
The Hot Mikado was a musical theatre adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado with an African-American cast. It was first produced by Mike Toddon Broadway in 1939. It starred Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the title role, with musical arrangements by Charles L. Cooke and direction by Hassard Short.

Mike Todd produced The Hot Mikado after the Federal Theatre Project turned down his offer to manage the WPA production of The Swing Mikado (another all-Black adaptation of The Mikado). Todd’s adaptation was jazzier than The Swing Mikado and had a “full-voiced, star-studded cast to back up its sass.” It follows both the storyline of The Mikado and the spectacle of the original and was noted for its wild costuming.”Rosa Brown’s outfit, a winged dress with train and a gigantic hat, weighed thirty-five pounds.” The spectacle and jazzed-up score received enthusiastic reviews and drew audiences; “critic George Jean Nathan presented it as the ‘best all-around musical show’, named Nat Karson ‘the season’s best costumer’, and hailed two performers, Rosa Brown as ‘best blues singer’ and, to no one’s surprise, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson as ‘best hoofer.'”

I

In Dahomey
In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy is a landmark 1903 American musical comedy described by theatre historian Gerald Bordman as “the first full-length musical written and played by blacks to be performed at a major Broadway house.” It features music by Will Marion Cook, book by Jesse A. Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was written by Jesse A. Shipp as a satire on the American Colonization Society’s back-to-Africa movement of the earlier nineteenth century.

In Dahomey is regarded as a marquee turning point for African-American representation in a vaudeville theater. It opened on February 18, 1903, at the New York Theatre, starring George Walker and Bert Williams, two iconic figures of vaudeville entertainment at the time. The musical ran for 53 completed performances, including two tours in the United States and one tour of the United Kingdom. In total, In Dahomey ran for a combined four years.

It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues
It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues is a musical revue written by Charles Bevel, Lita Gaithers, Randal Myler, Ron Taylor, and Dan Wheetman. It was originally produced at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts and later presented by the Crossroads Theatre, in association with San Diego Repertory Theatre and Alabama Shakespeare Festival in New York City.

The revue traces the history of “blues” music with more than three dozen songs. Ron Taylor acted as a singing narrator. It was directed by Randal Myler with movement by Donald McKayle.

It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues started as a Denver Center Theater Company school touring show in circa 1994. The Denver Center production played at the Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.), in November 1996. It subsequently opened in New York City at the New Victory Theater in March 1999 for a limited run, and then transferred to Broadway. It opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on April 26, 1999, transferred to the Ambassador Theatre on 9/7/1999, and ran until January 9, 2000, with 284 performances.

In 2011, the show was revived by the New Haarlem Arts Theater at the Aaron Davis Hall on the City College of New York campus.

J

 

Jelly’s Last Jam
Jelly’s Last Jam is a musical with a book by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and music by Jelly Roll Morton and Luther Henderson. Based on the life and career of Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, known as Jelly Roll Morton and generally regarded as one of the primary driving forces behind the introduction of jazz to the American public in the early 20th century, it also serves as a social commentary on the African-American experience during the era. LaMothe was born into a Louisiana Creole family that was established and free before the Civil War.

Jitney (play)
Jitney is a play by August Wilson. The eighth in his “Pittsburgh Cycle”, this play is set in a worn-down gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in early autumn 1977. The play premiered on Broadway in 2017.

Productions
Jitney was written in 1979 and first produced at the small Allegheny Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1982. When Wilson took his mother to see that production they arrived by jitney. That was followed by a separate production at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. After Wilson had a series of plays produced on Broadway, Eddie Gilbert, artistic director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, read the 1979 script and asked to produce it.

In response, Wilson returned to Pittsburgh in 1996 re-writing it extensively for what is referred to as its professional premiere, which was directed by Marion McClinton. This was the first Pittsburgh Cycle premiere not to be directed by Lloyd Richards. Over the next four years, there were up to 20 productions nationwide, many with the same core cast as in Pittsburgh, including the 1997 production at the Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey, which was directed by Walter Dallas, and the 1998 production at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, directed by McClinton.

Wilson continued working on the script. Jitney opened Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre on April 25, 2000, and closed on September 10, because another play was coming in. The play next moved to the Union Square Theatre on September 19, 2000, where it closed on January 28, 2001. Jitneyran successfully Off-Broadway, and was the only one of the 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays not to appear on Broadway, possibly because Wilson’s previous play had lost money, making investors cautious. Directed by Marion McClinton, the cast featured four actors who had been with it almost continuously since 1996: Anthony Chisholm (Fielding), Paul Butler (Becker), Willis Burks (Shealy) and Stephen McKinley Henderson (Turnbo).

Jitney went on to London and ran at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre from October 16, 2001, through November 21, 2001. It won the Olivier Award for best play of the year. Directed by McClinton, it featured much of the New York cast.

McClinton’s production moved to San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in early 2002.

The play has been performed often in regional theater, including at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2001, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 2002, Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C. in 2007, and the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. in 2008.

The Broadway premiere of Jitney began previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on December 28, 2016, and opened on January 19, 2017. The play closed on March 12, 2017.  The play, produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club, is directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

 

K

 

King Hedley II is a play by American playwright August Wilson, the ninth in his ten-part series, The Pittsburgh Cycle. The play ran on Broadway in 2001 and was revived Off-Broadway in 2007.

King Hedley II premiered at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 11, 1999, and played a number of other regional theaters, including Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington before its Broadway engagement.

The play opened on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre on May 1, 2001, and closed on July 1, 2001, after 72 performances and 24 previews. Directed by Marion McClinton, the cast featured Brian Stokes Mitchell (King), Leslie Uggams (Ruby), Charles Brown (Elmore), Viola Davis (Tonya), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Stool Pigeon), and Monté Russell (Mister).

The play ran off-Broadway at the Peter Norton Space, New York City, in a Signature Theatre Company production, from March 11, 2007, through April 22, 2007, in a season that featured Wilson’s work.

 

M 

 

Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life is a 1930 play by American authors Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The process of writing the play led Hughes and Hurston, who had been close friends, to sever their relationship. Mule Bone was not staged until 1991 when it was produced in New York City by the Lincoln Center Theater.

 

O

 

Once on This Island is a one-act musical with a book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty. Based on the 1985 novel My Love, My Love; or, The Peasant Girl by Rosa Guy, it is set in the French Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. It concerns a peasant girl on a tropical island, who uses the power of love to bring people together of different social classes.

The original Broadway production ran from 1990 to 1991, and the West End production opened in 1994, where it won the 1995 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The musical was revived on Broadway in a production that opened on December 3, 2017, at the Circle in the Square Theatre.

 

P

 

Passing Strange is a comedy-drama rock musical about a young African American’s artistic journey of self-discovery in Europe, with strong elements of philosophical existentialism, metafiction(especially self-referential humor), and the artistic journey. The musical’s lyrics and book are by Stew with music and orchestrations by Heidi Rodewald and Stew. It was created in collaboration with director Annie Dorsen.

The musical was developed at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in 2004 and 2005, one of the few works to be invited back for a second round of development.^[1] It had productions in Berkeley, California and Off-Broadway before opening on Broadway in 2008, garnering strong reviews and several awards. Spike Lee filmed the musical on Broadway in July 2008, premiering the film in 2009.

 

The Piano Lesson is a 1987 play by American playwright August Wilson. It is the fourth play in Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson began writing this play by playing with the various answers regarding the possibility of “acquir[ing] a sense of self-worth by denying one’s past”. The Piano Lesson received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

A Romare Bearden painting, The Piano Lesson, inspired Wilson to write a play featuring a strong female character to confront African-American history, paralleling Troy in earlier Fences. However, on finishing his play, Wilson found the ending to stray from the empowered female character as well as from the question regarding self-worth. What The Piano Lesson finally seems to ask is: “What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?”

Set in 1936 Pittsburgh during the aftermath of the Great Depression, The Piano Lesson follows the lives of the Charles family in the Doaker Charles household and an heirloom, the family piano, which is decorated with designs carved by an enslaved ancestor. The play focuses on the arguments between a brother and a sister who have different ideas on what to do with the piano. The brother, Boy Willie, is a sharecropper who wants to sell the piano to buy the land (Sutter’s land) where his ancestors toiled as slaves. The sister, Berniece, remains emphatic about keeping the piano, which shows the carved faces of their great-grandfather’s wife and son during the days of their enslavement.

 

Porgy: A Play in Four Acts is a play by Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, adapted from the short novel by DuBose Heyward. It was first produced by the Theatre Guild and presented on October 10, 1927 – August 1928 at the Guild Theatre in New York City. Featuring a cast of African Americans at the insistence of its authors—a decision unusual for its time—the original production starred Frank Wilson, Evelyn Ellis, Jack Carter, and Rose McClendon. Porgy marked the Broadway directing debut of Rouben Mamoulian. The play ran a total of 55 weeks in New York, and the original cast toured the United States twice and performed for 11 consecutive weeks in London.

The play tells the story of Porgy, a disabled Black beggar who lives in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina. It relates his efforts to rescue Bess, the woman he loves, from Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and a drug dealer called Sporting Life.

The play is the basis of the libretto of the opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

 

Porgy and Bess is an English-language opera by the American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel of the same name.

Porgy and Bess was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway in New York City. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. After an initially unpopular public reception, a 1976 Houston Grand Opera production gained its new popularity, and it is now one of the best-known and most frequently performed operas.

The libretto of Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street-beggar living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin’ Life, her drug dealer. The opera plot generally follows the stage play.

In the years following Gershwin’s death, Porgy and Bess were adapted for smaller-scale performances. It was adapted as a film in 1959. Some of the songs in the opera, such as “Summertime”, became popular and are frequently recorded.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the trend has been toward productions with greater fidelity to Gershwin’s original intentions. Smaller-scale productions also continue to be mounted. A complete recorded version of the score was released in 1976; since then, it has been recorded several times.

 

Purlie is a musical with a book by Ossie Davis, Philip Rose, and Peter Udell, lyrics by Udell and music by Gary Geld. It is based on Davis’s 1961 play Purlie Victorious, which was later made into the 1963 film Gone Are the Days! and which included many of the original Broadway cast, including Davis, Ruby Dee, Alan Alda, Beah Richards, Godfrey Cambridge, and Sorrell Booke.

Purlie is set in an era when Jim Crow laws still were in effect in the American South. Its focus is on the dynamic traveling preacher Purlie Victorious Judson, who returns to his small Georgia town hoping to save Big Bethel, the community’s church, and emancipate the cotton pickers who work on oppressive Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee’s plantation. With the assistance of Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, Purlie hopes to pry loose from Cotchipee an inheritance due to his long-lost cousin and use the money to achieve his goals. Also playing a part in Purlie’s plans is Cotchipee’s son Charlie, who ultimately proves to be far more fair-minded than his Simon Legree–like father and who saves the church from destruction with an act of defiance that has dire consequences for the tyrannical Cap’n.

 

R

 

Radio Golf is a play by American playwright, August Wilson, the final installment in his ten-part series, The Century Cycle. It was first performed in 2005 by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and had its Broadway premiere in 2007 at the Cort Theatre. It is Wilson’s final work.

Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated man who has inherited a real estate agency from his father, his ambitious wife Mame, and his friend Roosevelt Hicks want to redevelop the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The project, called the Bedford Hills Redevelopment Project, includes two high-rise apartment buildings and high-end chain stores like Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Barnes & Noble. Harmond is also about to declare his candidacy to be Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. Roosevelt has just been named a vice-president of Mellon Bank and has been tapped by a Bernie Smith to help him acquire a local radio station at less than market value, which is possible through a minority tax incentive.

A complication arises when Harmond discovers that the house at 1839 Wylie, slated for demolition, was acquired illegally. Harmond offers the owner of the property market value for the house, but the owner refuses to sell. Harmond decides the only way to proceed is to build around the house, which will require minor modifications to the planned development, and calls the demolition company to cancel the demolition. Roosevelt sees no reason to delay since no one but Harmond, Roosevelt, Mame, and the house’s owner know the truth, a view Mame supports. When, on the day of the demolition, which Roosevelt has put back into motion, Harmond refuses to be swayed from his stand, Roosevelt announces he will be buying Harmond out and Bernie Smith will be helping him. Harmond accuses Roosevelt of being Smith’s “blackface” and the two argue over the consequences of Harmond demanding changes in the development plans and if Roosevelt is allowing himself to be used by Bernie Smith. Harmond tells Roosevelt to leave the Bedford Hills Redevelopment office, which is owned by Wilks Realty. The scene ends with Harmond leaving the office to join the group of Hill residents at 1839 Wylie protesting the demolition.

 

Raisin is a musical with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Robert Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. It is an adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun; the musical’s book was co-written by Hansberry’s husband, Robert Nemiroff.

The story concerns an African-American family in Chicago in 1951. The musical was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning two, including Best Musical, and the Broadway production ran for 847 performances.

In Chicago in 1951, an African-American family, Ruth Younger, her husband Walter Lee Younger, their son Travis and Walter’s mother are living in a cramped apartment. Walter is a chauffeur but thinks that his father’s life insurance policy proceeds will buy a way to a better life. He plans on buying a liquor store, but his mother Mama Lena Younger is against the selling of liquor. Tensions arise as Walter tries to convince Mama Lena to forget her dream of buying the family its own small house (“A Whole Lotta Sunlight”).

Walter decides to make the deal for the liquor store and signs the papers with his partners Bobo Jones and Willie Harris. Beneatha Younger, Walter’s sister, is in college and is romantically involved with an African exchange student, Asagai. When Walter comes home drunk he joins Beneatha in a celebratory dance, picturing himself as a chieftain (“African Dance”). Ruth and Walter fight about their future but they reconcile (“Sweet Time”). Mama arrives to announce that she has bought a house in the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, and Walter leaves in anger (“You Done Right”).

Walter has not returned home and Mama finds him in a bar. She apologizes and gives him an envelope filled with money. She asks him to deposit $3,000 for Beneatha’s college education and tells him the rest is for him. As the family packs to move, a representative of Clybourne Park, Karl Lindner, arrives and offers to buy back the house. Walter, Ruth, and Beneatha mockingly tell Mama of the enlightened attitude of their new neighbors. Just then Bobo arrives to tell the family the bad news that Willie has run off with the money. This forces Walter to contact Lindner and accept the offer to buy back the house. Although Beneatha berates her brother for not standing up for principles, Mama shows compassion and understanding (“Measure the Valleys”).

When Lindner arrives, Walter announces that the family will, after all, move to the new house.

 

Rang Tang is a musical that premiered on July 12, 1927, on Broadway at the Royale Theater and ran for 119 performances, including a 14-week overrun, during which, the production moved September 12, 1927, to the Majestic – finishing October 24, 1927. It was acclaimed as one of the most successful Black musical revues of the latter 1920s, owed much to a star-laden cast headlined by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The book — in 2 acts and 12 scenes (2 scenes added later) — is by Kaj Gynt; the lyrics are by Joseph H. Trent; the music is composed by Ford Dabney, who tailored some of the songs for Mae Barnes and Evelyn Preer; the score and post-production music was published by Leo Feist; all copyrighted in 1927 and copyrights renewed in 1954

The production premiered 1 month and 22 days after the world’s first solo transatlantic flight – from Roosevelt Field, Mineola, Long Island, to Le Bourget Aerodrome, Paris, by Charles Lindbergh. The musical title, Rang Tang, is slang for an orangutan.

Plot
Sam Peck (Miller) and Steve Jenkins (Lyles) are two debt-ridden Jimtown barbers who flee their creditors, steal an airplane, and, in the spirit of Charles Lindbergh, embark on another, further, albeit non-solo, first transatlantic non-stop flight from America to Africa in search of treasure. Toward the end of their destination, however, while in flight, the plane begins to malfunction and the wings fall off. Following a safe emergency splash landing in the sea near Madagascar, they meet the Queen of Sheba (Josephine Hall), the King of Madagascar (Daniel L. Haynes), and (iii) a Zulu tribe. Peck and Jenkins become involved in series of comedic misadventures with natives and fierce animals in the forests, jungles, and deserts – staged as a mythical, exotic, and, at times, terrifying native land. They find a buried treasure, return to the U.S., and arrive at a Harlem cabaret, where they celebrate in grand style their new status as two of the richest men in the world.

 

The River Niger is a play by American playwright Joseph A. Walker, first performed by New York City’s Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in 1972. The production made its Broadway debut with a transfer to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 27 March 1973 for a run of 162 performances.

The play was adapted by Walker for the film in 1976, directed by Krishna Shah starring Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones.

Awards and nominations
Awards

1973 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright – Joseph A. Walker
1973 Obie Award for Best American Play
1974 Tony Award for Best Play
Nominations

1974 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play – Douglas Turner Ward
1974 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play – Roxie Roker

 

S

 

Sarafina! is a South African musical by Mbongeni Ngema depicting students involved in the Soweto Riots, in opposition to apartheid. It was also adapted into a 1992 film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Leleti Khumalo. Sarafina! premiered on Broadway on 28 January 1988, at the Cort Theatre, and closed on 2 July 1989, after 597 performances and 11 previews. The musical was conceived and directed by Mbongeni Ngema, who also wrote the book, music, and lyrics. The play was first presented at The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa, in June 1987. The cast included Leleti Khumalo as Sarafina.

Leleti Khumalo received a Tony Award nomination, Best Featured Actress in a Musical, as well as an NAACP Image Award for her Broadway theatre portrayal of the title character. The production was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Choreography, and Best Direction of a Musical.

The show presents a school uprising similar to the Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976. A narrator introduces several characters among them the schoolgirl activist Sarafina. Things get out of control when policemen shoot several pupils at the school. Nevertheless, the musical ends with a cheerful farewell show of pupils leaving school, which takes most of the second act.

The production of the play was chronicled in the documentary film Voices of Sarafina!.

 

Seven Guitars is a 1995 play by American playwright August Wilson. It focuses on seven African-American characters in the year 1948. The play begins and ends after the funeral of one of the main characters, showing events leading to the funeral in flashbacks. Seven Guitars represents the 1940s entry in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade anthology of African-American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the twentieth century; Wilson would revisit the stories of some of these characters in King Hedley II, set in the 1980s.

Just released from jail, Blues singer Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton is asked to sign a record deal after a song he recorded months before becomes an unexpected hit. After a year of trials and tribulations, Floyd is ready to right the past year’s wrongs and return to Chicago with a new understanding of what’s important in his life. Unfortunately, his means of righting wrongs are inherently flawed.

The play’s recurring theme is the African-American male’s fight for his own humanity, self-understanding, and self-acceptance in the face of personal and societal ills. The rooster is a recurring symbol of black manhood throughout the play and provides a violent and shocking foreshadowing effect when Hedley delivers a fiery monologue and ritualistically slaughters one in front of the other characters.

Awards and nominations
Awards
1996 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play
Nominations
1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
1996 Drama Desk Award for Best Play
1996 Tony Award for Best Play

 

Shuffle Along is a musical with music and lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and a thin revue-style connecting plot about a mayoral race, written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles.

The piece premiered on Broadway in 1921, running for 504 performances – an unusually long run during that decade. It launched the careers of Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington, and Paul Robeson, and became such a hit that it caused “curtain time traffic jams” on West 63rd Street.[4] It had brief revivals in 1933 and 1952.

Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed is a musical adaptation based on the original book of the 1921 musical, focusing on the challenges of mounting the original production of Shuffle Along and its effect on Broadway and race relations.

The four writers were African-American Vaudeville veterans who first met in 1920 at an NAACP benefit that was held at the newly opened Dunbar Theatre in Philadelphia.[5] None of the four had ever written a musical or even appeared on Broadway.  Promoters were skeptical that a black-written and produced show would appeal to Broadway audiences. After finding a small source of funding, Shuffle Along toured through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. However, with little funding, it was difficult to meet travel and production expenses, and the cast rarely got paid. When the show came back to New York, about a year later, during the Depression of 1920–21, the production owed $18,000 and faced strong competition on Broadway in a season that included Florenz Ziegfeld’s Sally and a new edition of George White’s Scandals. It was only able to book a remote theater on West 63rd Street that had no orchestra pit. In the end, however, the show earned $9 million from its original Broadway production and three touring companies, an unusual sum in its time.

Miller and Lyles wrote thin, jokey dialogue scenes to connect the songs: “The plot of  Shuffle Along was mainly to allow an excuse for singing and dancing.” But the musical drew repeat audiences due to its jazzy music styles, which were a modern, edgy contrast to the mainstream song-and-dance styles that audiences had seen on Broadway for two decades. The show’s dancing and 16-girl chorus line were more reasons why the show was so successful.  According to Time magazine, Shuffle Along was the first Broadway musical that prominently featured syncopated jazz music and the first to feature a chorus of professional female dancers. It introduced musical hits such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry“, “Love Will Find a Way“, and “In Honeysuckle Time”. The musical launched or boosted the careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington, and Adelaide Hall. The show also contributed to the desegregation of theaters in the 1920s, giving many Black actors their first chance to appear on Broadway. Once the show left New York, it toured for three years and was, according to Barbara Glass, the first Black musical to play in White theaters across the United States. Its appeal to audiences of all races, and to celebrities such as George Gershwin, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, Langston Hughes and critic George Jean Nathan, helped to unite the white Broadway and Black jazz communities and improve race relations in America.

Plot
Two dishonest partners in a grocery store, Sam and Steve, both run for mayor in Jimtown, USA. If either one wins, he agrees to appoint the other his chief of police. Sam wins with the help of a crooked campaign manager. Sam keeps his promise to appoint Steve as chief of police, but they begin to disagree on petty matters. They resolve their differences in a long, comic fight. As they fight, their opponent for the mayoral position, virtuous Harry Walton, vows to end their corrupt regime (“I’m Just Wild About Harry“). Harry gets the people behind him and wins the next election, as well as the lovely Jessie, and runs Sam and Steve out of town. One character remarks that the lighter the skin, the more desirable an African-American woman is

 

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Timbuktu! is a musical, with lyrics by George Forrest and Robert Wright, set to music by Borodin, Forrest, and Wright. The book is by Luther Davis. It is a resetting of Forrest and Wright’s musical Kismet. The musical is set in 1361 in Timbuktu, in the Empire of Mali, West Africa.

Production
The musical premiered on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on March 1, 1978, and closed on September 10, 1978, after 221 performances and 22 previews.

The original production starred Eartha Kitt as Shaleem-La-Lume, William Marshall as Hadji, Gilbert Price as the Mansa of Mali, Melba Moore as Marsinah, and George Bell as the Wazir. Ira Hawkins replaced Marshall prior to the Broadway opening.[1] It was directed, choreographed and costume designed by Geoffrey Holder, with sets designed by Tony Straiges. Alan Eichler was an associate producer. Gerald Bordman noted that the sets and costumes had “a Ziegfeldian opulence.” New songs based on African folk music were added to provide “some tonal verisimilitude.”

Following its Broadway run, it toured for more than a year with Kitt continuing in her starring role as Shaleem-La-Lume, Gregg Baker as Hadji, Bruce Hubbard as the Mansa and Vanessa Shaw as Marsinah.

 

Treemonisha (1911) is an opera by American ragtime composer Scott Joplin. Though it encompasses a wide range of musical styles other than ragtime, and Joplin did not refer to it as such, it is sometimes referred to as a “ragtime opera”. The music of Treemonisha includes an overture and prelude, along with various recitatives, choruses, small ensemble pieces, a ballet, and a few arias.

The opera was largely unknown before its first complete performance in 1972. Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1976 for Treemonisha. The performance was called a “semimiracle” by music historian Gilbert Chase, who said Treemonisha “bestowed its creative vitality and moral message upon many thousands of delighted listeners and viewers” when it was recreated. The musical style of the opera is the popular romantic one of the early 20th century. It has been described as “charming and piquant and … deeply moving”,  with elements of Black folk songs and dances, including a kind of pre-blues music, spirituals, and a call-and-response style scene featuring a preacher and congregation.

The opera celebrates African-American music and culture while stressing that education is the salvation of the Negro race. The heroine and symbolic educator is Treemonisha, who runs into trouble with a local band of conjurers, who kidnap her.

History
Joplin completed Treemonisha in 1910 and paid for a piano-vocal score to be published in 1911. At the time of the publication, he sent a copy of the score to the American Musician and Art Journal. Treemonisha received a glowing, full-page review in the June issue. The review said it was an “entirely new phase of musical art and… a thoroughly American opera (style).” affirmed Joplin’s goal of creating a distinctive form of African-American opera.

Scott Joplin
Despite this endorsement, the opera was never fully staged during his lifetime. Its sole performance was a concert read-through in 1915 with Joplin at the piano, at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, New York, paid for by Joplin.[1] One of Joplin’s friends, Sam Patterson, described this performance as “thin and unconvincing, little better than a rehearsal… its special quality (would have been) lost on the typical Harlem audience (that was) sophisticated enough to reject their folk past but not sufficiently so to relish a return to it”.

Aside from a concert-style performance in 1915 of the ballet Frolic of the Bears from Act II, by the Martin-Smith Music School,[9] the opera was forgotten until 1970 when the score was rediscovered. On October 22, 1971, excerpts from Treemonisha were presented in concert form at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with musical performances by William Bolcom, Joshua Rifkin, and Mary Lou Williams supporting a group of singers.

The world premiere took place on January 27, 1972, as a joint production of the music department of Morehouse College and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, Georgia, using the orchestration by T. J. Anderson. The performance was directed by Katherine Dunham, former head of a noted African-American dance company in her own name, and conducted by Robert Shaw. He is one of the first major American conductors to hire both black and white singers for his chorale. The production was well-received by both audiences and critics.

The orchestration notes for Treemonisha have been completely lost, as has Joplin’s first opera A Guest of Honor (1903). Subsequent performances have been produced using orchestrations created by a variety of composers, including T. J. Anderson, Gunther Schuller, and most recently, Rick Benjamin. Since its premiere, Treemonisha has been performed all over the United States, at venues such as the Houston Grand Opera (twice, once with Schuller’s 1982 orchestration), the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and in 1975 at the Uris Theatre on Broadway, to overwhelming critical and public acclaim. Opera historian Elise Kirk noted that

“the opera slumbered in oblivion for more than half a century before making a triumphant Broadway debut. It was also recorded commercially in its entirety – the earliest African American opera to achieve that distinction and the earliest to receive widespread modern recognition and performance.”