The history of African Americans on Broadway, especially before, say, 1975 or so, is skimpy. Looking only at musicals, there were black characters in plays like 1927’s Show Boat (though in many shows, the roles were played by white actors in blackface because mixed-race casts were risky—and even prohibited in Jim Crow states). All-black shows appeared as early as 1898 with Clorindy, a series of scenes and sketches by black poet and lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and musician-composer Will Marion Cook (1869-1944), deemed the first Broadway musical with an African-American cast, followed in 1903 by In Dahomey starring Bert Williams (1874-1922) and George Walker (1873-1911), the first nationally prominent black comedy team, written by Williams and Walker in collaboration with Dunbar and Cook. In 1921, Shuffle Along came into New York after a moderately successful tour—and became a smash hit with white audiences. Written by vaudevillians Flournoy Miller (1887-1971) and Aubrey Lyles (1884?-1932) based on one of their music hall sketches, and scored by Eubie Blake (1883-1983; music) and Noble Sissle (1889-1975; lyrics), its story was simple and silly, but the music was glorious (spawning the hit “I’m Just Wild About Harry”) and Shuffle Along ran for 504 performances on Broadway (to integrated audiences) and then spawned multiple touring companies. (A revival of Shuffle Along with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald, directed by George C. Wolfe, who’s written a new libretto, and choreographed by Savion Glover, will open on Broadway in April 2016.)
Sissle and Blake went on to compose other Broadway musicals, none as momentous as Shuffle Along, and a short-lived trend of black musicals enlivened Broadway theater for a time. Until Porgy and Bess hit the boards in 1935. Set in Charleston, South Carolina, with a serious book and soaring score, Porgy and Bess, the Gershwins’ folk opera, was a ground-breaker, but there was little follow-up. Despite its acclaim, Porgy and Bess only ran 124 performances in its début mounting, but it quickly became a perennial on Broadway (seven revivals through 2012) and spawned a 1959 award-winning film adaptation with a star-studded cast. In this milieu arose Cabin in the Sky, a 1940 all-black musical with a book by Lynn Root, lyrics by John Latouche, and music by Vernon Duke. It also had choreography by George Balanchine (who directed as well), assisted by Katherine Dunham, and a cast that included Dunham, Dooley Wilson (soon to be nationally recognized as Sam the piano-player at Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca), Ethel Waters, and Todd Duncan (Porgy in Porgy and Bess). The play ran 156 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld). Cabin, however, has been described as a “simplistically drawn allegory” and a “succès d’estime,” and has never been revived on Broadway since its première. (There was a 47-performance run Off-Broadway in 1964 with Rosetta LeNoire and a concert staging at New York City’s 14th Street YMHA presented by Musicals Tonight! in October 2003.)
I’d known of Cabin in the Sky by title for decades, but I’d never seen it or heard the score. (It’s possible my father saw the play in his youth—he saw a lot of the classics growing up in New York City—but the cast album, if there even was one, wasn’t among those I inherited.) Even though I was familiar with songs like “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe” (which was added for the bowdlerized 1943 movie version), I was never aware they’d come from Cabin. So when my theater friend Diana called to say that Encores! was presenting Cabin, I jumped at the chance to see it. Perhaps not as historically prominent as Mark Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, which I saw in an Encores! Concert in 2013 (see my blog report on 1 August 2013), but it’s something I’d known about in a vague sense and wanted to check out. So on Friday evening, 12 February, Diana and I met at City Center to see the Cabin concert, despite the bitter-cold temperatures (it was under 25ºF that night). The Cabin in the S