but 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 Sky 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 