so is Balanchine and Dunham’s choreography. (The film version was directed by Vincente Minnelli and, though no choreographer was credited, Busby Berkeley is known to have assisted Minnelli and clearly “Hollywoodized” the dancing.) From these scant artifacts, Encores! had to reconstruct Cabin for performance. Starting in 2014, under the guidance of Encores! musical director Rob Berman and arranger Jonathan Tunick (2014 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Award for contributions “to the works of legendary composer, Stephen Sondheim, and the canon of American theater”), the Encores! team reassembled the score, orchestrations, and dances as closely as they could to the 1940 production. (In honor of Tunick’s recognition, I ran an old report on the 1976 première of Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, which Tunick orchestrated, on ROT on 15 May 2014.) Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, an actor and director with a special gift for the works of August Wilson, co-edited the text, deciding what should stay and what should go, including sensitive racial references (he excised words like ‘pickaninny,’ for example) that in 2016 might disrupt the receptivity of the play.
(That the play, like many other “African-American” scripts of its era—with the notable exception of Shuffle Along—was created by white men was a concern only glancingly noted by the current press. Even the major contribution of Dunham, the only black artist on the creative team, went uncredited in the program, a common practice when it came to African-American collaborators. Only Jesse Green of New York magazine made a point of this circumstance, calling the play “compromised.” By today’s standards, the characters come close to racial caricatures, and so does the plot. In addition, as Green pointed out, the musical’s set in “a mythical American South untroubled by racism or even much poverty,” as if those aspects of American life didn’t exist. Of course, I don’t know what else, in addition to the word ‘pickaninny,’ Santiago-Hudson cut from the text, but it’s pretty certain that Cabin in the Sky was a product, however well-intentioned, of an America that practiced at the very least a subliminal racism, including on its mainstream stages. Green also saw that the top-flight black performers in the Encores! Cabin being “available for this production says a lot about the conditions still governing the commercial theater.” Nonetheless, as even Green acknowledged, seeing even “compromised” plays like this one—and Encores! has staged quite a few of them in its history—is a useful and worthwhile practice lest we forget that aspect of our theater history. Furthermore, Green suggests, “the opportunity to keep black musical artists working, if even on thorny material like this, is not to be gainsaid.”)
The story of Cabin in the Sky is of chronic gambler and womanizer “Little Joe” Jackson (Michael Potts) who, having been slashed by Domino Johnson (Jonathan Kirkland) at John Henry’s club over an unpaid IOU, lies on his deathbed. As Little Joe is attended by Dr. Jones (Wayne Pretlow) and Brother Green (J. D. Webster), the pastor, Joe’s wife, the devout Petunia Jackson (LaChanze), prays to God not to take her husband, whom she says is really a good man at heart. She even promises that if God gives Joe back to her, she’ll gladly go with him when his final time comes. On the scene is the Head Man (Chuck Cooper), Lucifer’s agent, perched on a gold throne, aided by three Henchmen (Dennis Stowe, Tiffany Mann, Rebecca L. Hargrove), expecting to pick up Little Joe’s soul. Dr. Jones pronounces Joe dead, but Petunia’s prayers have reached Heaven and the Lord’s General (Norm Lewis) arrives on a silver throne with three Angels (Nicholas Ward, Kristolyn Lloyd, Jared Joseph). The two supernatural figures argue over who should get Joe’s soul, and they strike a deal to give Little Joe six months to redeem himself by living a moral life.
Joe rises from his bed, much to the surprise of everyone—and the delight of Petunia. Joe intends to live a Godly life, but he’s sorely tempted. He attends church with his wife an