As I sat in the theater, I tried to summon their excitement and anxiety. It wasn’t often that they could sit anywhere they wanted in a Broadway theater, much less watch black performers sing and dance in their own show.
Pinch me, I can imagine someone joking to another.
I wasn’t thinking of George Gershwin or Fanny Brice who sat in orchestra seats that had always been off-limits to blacks. I was thinking of the black folks sitting in the orchestra and in rows as far back as where I was sitting last weekend who had come to see the 1921 production of “Shuffle Along” at the 63rd Street Music Hall in New York.
I was there with friends 95 years later to get a backstage peek at one of Broadway’s earliest all-black shows.
The original “Shuffle Along” was written and produced by African Americans, and they starred in it. That was practically unheard of on a Broadway stage. The show had been conceived by two pairs of performers: The songwriting team of Eubie Blake (composer) and Noble Sissle (lyricist), and the story-writing team of F. (Flournoy) E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles. They had come out of vaudeville and minstrel shows – the entertainment form of the day that required the use of blackface (burnt cork) and comic routines for laughs.
The new Broadway show retained the original title but added a subtitle: “The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.” The musical at the Music Box Theater on Broadway featured Audra McDonald who’s made her mark on Broadway (and will be leaving the show for a short hiatus in June), Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter (you saw him in “Kinky Boots”), Joshua Henry and Brando Victor Dixon (you saw him as Berry Gordy in “Motown the Musical”).
The show tells two stories: that of the making of the original show along with scenes from the original stage performances, weaved in and out in a harmonious blend. It’s loud and rousing, and you must see it. Keep in mind, though, that if you are not in your seat when the show starts and after intermission, you will not be seated. Last weekend, an elderly man who had gone to the bathroom at intermission and arrived late was refused admittance by the usher. When she refused even after the wife asked to let her husband back in, the wife joined him in the hallway. I’m not sure if they were ever re-admitted.
On stage, the show told not only of the story of the making of “Shuffle” but the history of black people’s place in this society. It also showed how they lived among themselves – their relationships with each other, struggles to pay the bills, succumbing to vices. They also showed people who knew how to make do with what they had: building an orchestra pit where there had been none, fashioning costumes from discarded clothing, stubbornly staying the course when they were $18,000 in debt, believing in what they were divined to do.
It was also about the beautiful rhythms of tap and the boundless sound that it makes when metal meets wood. Tap master Savion Glover was the choreographer, and his pounding moves were in every toe of the dancers. (A teenaged Josephine Baker joined as a dancer early on in the original production, but it’s not clear if she was on the Broadway stage or on the 1922 tour.)
The original “Shuffle” was not the first all-black musical on Broadway (one other was “In Dahomey” in 1903 featuring the team of George Walker and Bert Williams). A musical comedy, “Shuffle” is the tale of two friends in Jimtown who run for mayor against each other, with the promise that whoever wins will hire the other as police chief. They both get what they want, but start to bicker and get into a fight. They are booted out in the next election.
“Shuffle” hit the road before settling on May 23, 1921, at a theater away from the heart of Broadway with little money (they scraped together costumes from other shows and sometimes built songs around them). The show offered jazz music and dance, the usual minstrel gags and jokes, and blackface. The show was saddled with money worries, but it finally found its audience and was deemed a financial success (one estimate was that it made $1.4 million), running for 504 performances. At one point, the ticket price was raised to $3.
It played to a mixed crowd of blacks and whites. Traffic was so backed up that 63rd Street was changed to one way. A facsimile Dec. 26, 1921, handout given to us last weekend showed Monday matinees, along with an 11:30 p.m. midnight performance.
More than that, though, the show put African Americans in a brighter light, and demonstrated that an all-black production could make a go of it on Broadway. It featured not only Baker, but Paul Robeson (who joined the men’s ensemble in 1922 and stayed for a month), Florence Mills (singer and actress who became an international star), Nat King Cole (a pianist in the national tour of a later revival of the show) and composer William Grant Still (who was in the pit orchestra).
The original was also the first to include a love story between a black man and woman, which made the team uneasy about how it would be accepted by a white audience. As one character put it in the new show: Black folks can love watermelon (as seen in most any early images of them), they can love Virginia (as in the song “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” by James A. Bland), they can love the South, but they can’t love each other.
In the new show, McDonald, playing actress Lottie Gee, made comic relief of the taboo as she hesitantly embraced her man while singing “Love Will Find A Way.” Gee was the star of the original show and sang one of its most famous songs, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which became the theme song for Harry Truman’s presidential campaign in 1948.
For the next decade, “Shuffle” spawned other such shows, including “The Blackbirds of 1928,” which introduced Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The team broke up, but each pair produced their own shows. Miller and Lyle starred in “Runnin’ Wild” that showcased the Charleston, and Sissle and Blake produced “Chocolate Dandies” featuring Baker. The four came together again in 1933 for a remake of “Shuffle Along,” but the show was not successful.
During the 1930s, African-American-produced shows were dying down, and the Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (whose only black talent was on stage) had taken over.
Near the end of the performance in the new Broadway show, we were told what happened to each of the cast members, along with when they died. The earliest to die was Lyles in 1932 from pulmonary tuberculosis. The last was Blake, who lived to see a Broadway show of his life titled “Eubie,” and to be widely feted as a pioneer. He died at age 100 in 1983.
