ky concert opened at City Center on 10 February and ran through the 14th.
Duke, Latouche, and set designer Boris Aronson went south to Virginia, Latouche’s home state, to get a feel for the play’s milieu. (The play’s setting is described only as “Somewhere in the South,” but there are hints in the script that Root was thinking of Virginia; not the least suggestive is the song “My Old Virginia Home on the Nile.”) Ultimately, the script and score were written and producer Albert Lewis convinced Balanchine to direct and choreograph the production. (Cabin was Balanchine’s début as the director of an entire Broadway show.) The creative team also brought in Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), to whom they also gave a lead role (Georgia Brown), and her company to create the dances. The J. Rosamond Johnson gospel choir was added to sing traditional spirituals in the show to augment the original material.
Coming on the heels of both Porgy and Bess and Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures (on Broadway in revival at the same time as Porgy and Bess), the cast of Cabin’s première included Duncan, the original Porgy, as The Lawd’s General, and Rex Ingram, De Lawd in the 1936 film version of Green Pastures, as Lucifer, Jr. (The Head Man in the Encores! concert). Ethel Waters agreed to star as Petunia Jackson, Little Joe’s wife, once the title had been changed from Little Joe to Cabin in the Sky. Like Green Pastures, the musical had a biblical premise and featured gospel singing; like Porgy and Bess, it was set in the rural South.
But the play was only a modest hit on stage, and the MGM film version was considerably altered, omitting most of the Duke-Latouche score (replaced with Harburg-Arlen numbers). Little of the original staging has survived, reports Viertel—just the script, the piano score, the première’s program (as a guide to where some numbers went in the performance sequence), and four songs by Waters that were recorded with the show’s orchestra (to give a hint about the arrangements). The original orchestrations are lost and 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 