All we know about him is that he was a brilliant dancer — an artist, not just an athlete — and that he was the first black entertainer to perform before large crowds of whites in a context that transcended the informal. It was a supergroup of black Broadway and designed to be such. I kept thinking of one of those movies where they’re trying to lift something out of the desert, some buried archaeological monument, and everyone’s wondering if the ropes will hold. Wolfe’s solution has been to build a kind of historical box around the set pieces. The coverage he received from the English press from 1848 to 1852 is almost exhausting to follow, it grew to be so extensive, mostly ecstatic in its praise. It was an implausible-­sounding idea that succeeded wildly. W. C. Fields claimed to sense “a deep undercurrent of pathos” in Williams. The manager of the theater took a positive stand this time, and said he would close his doors rather than violate the rule against letting Negroes occupy the orchestra chairs. Except, never completely. She was a star. Energy food — goat meat, mac and cheese, yams. a frog in a cartoon? Langston Hughes said more than once that “Shuffle Along” was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. The spectators wouldn’t accept it, or the laws and civic codes wouldn’t permit it, or Barnum himself just couldn’t deal with it. But it emerged from a single crude reality: African-­American people were not allowed to perform onstage for much of the 19th century. Movie night at the Obamas’, curated by Mitch McConnell. A forgotten incident from their “Policy Players” tour of 1899-1900 makes clear how real the tensions were. At the same time, he had been making a name for himself as one of the first black arts critics in America, writing for The New York Age, a black newspaper. It suggests a body that’s resting slightly because it’s about to burst into motion, which he kept doing throughout the morning (this was late last summer). But she insisted that it had been for love. And yet, that Rudin’s machinations helped to make it possible, to assemble all that talent and power in the service of resurrecting a crucial piece of African-­American history, reminded me of an uncomfortable fact, namely that Rudin was caught two years ago in the Sony email hack making racist jokes. There could have been no Sam Beckett without Bert Williams. The plot centers on the characters Sam and Steve who run for mayor in Jimtown, USA. At a moment when the conversation about blacks and how they’re represented in American entertainment is as fraught as it has been since “The Birth of a Nation,” this bunch had undertaken to put one of the sacred relics of black theater back in front of the public. He was in a show called “Under the Bamboo Tree.” He went down in Detroit. It was getting too great a hold on me and I simply had to overcome it. His would-be co-stars threatened to quit; they didn’t want to appear on the same bill with a black man. Their 1907-9 show “Bandanna Land” played for capacity houses on tour and at the Majestic Theater at Columbus Circle, a much more legitimate “Broadway” house than the Sixty-­Third Street Music Hall could ever aspire to be, and those audiences included, according to a much younger Lester Walton, “hundreds of white theatergoers.”. Juba came up performing in the interracial underworld “halls” in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Sam keeps his promise to appoint Steve as chief of police, but they begin to disagree on petty matters. Throughout her career as a singer and dancer she confronted racial stereotypes, broke down barriers, and won over black and white audiences alike. They had teams of supporters. At tap’s higher levels, a dancer can hit an ungodly number of beats per second, so the variations of pattern that are potential in just two or three seconds’ span can quickly jump beyond a normal person’s ability to follow. Kyer, on the other hand — the man to whom she was still quite married when she and Blake started getting together — was from Philadelphia. The musical mélange became an instant hit because of the energetic, vivacious, torso-twisting dancers that gave birth to the speed shows that were to characterize black productions thereafter. A problem: The music hall had no orchestra pit, and this show needed an orchestra. If I sneezed on a rainy day I’d never see a sunny one. There was an inescapable sense that they’d be letting down more than themselves if they failed. They couldn’t be saved with historical buttressing, or even historical reimagining. Her “Salome” dance took over New York for about a year, around 1912. Ninety-­five years ago in New York, a journalist named Lester Walton bought a ticket to see a much-­buzzed-­about new show, a “musical novelty” that had opened about a week before at the Sixty-­Third Street Theater. The cakewalk was a dance, created by slaves in imitation (some accounts say in mockery) of the white minuet. Though Sam wins, their corrupt regime is discredited by the honest Harry Walton, and Sam and Steve are run out of town. No, I don’t care for Baltimore.”. When Williams and Walker found they were really “up against it” they receded from their position, and consented to go on. Whatever lay behind the scenes, the fact is the production would be responsible for a truly magical bit of casting: Audra McDonald in the role of the singer and original “Shuffle Along” star Lottie Gee. Miller, Aubrey Lyles, Eubie Blake and myself to birth ‘Shuffle Along.’ Few people know, but Bert Williams playing in Ziegfeld Follies and [being] the only Negro playing Broadway at that time was literally a father to the four of us during the birth of ‘Shuffle Along’ and gave us every blessing and advice at his masterly command. In front of the cabin, in the nursery, in a tavern, yes, white people might enjoy hearing them sing and seeing them dance, but the stage had power in it, and someone who appeared there couldn’t help partaking of that power, if only ever so slightly, momentarily. I was tempted to read his death, at least as it related to “Shuffle Along,” as a tragedy. Let’s keep our love fires burning bright. He grew up in Florida and California. Plot & Creation. An argument could be made (has been made, by the scholar David S. Thompson in his unpublished “Shuffle Along in Theatrical Context”) that the reason chorus girls, or the stereotypical chorus girls in your mind, dance jazz is “Shuffle Along.” As Wolfe told me, “It introduced syncopation into the American musical,” meaning syncopation but also meaning blackness. Their eyes watching him were hard to look away from. We were in a rehearsal space at the New 42nd Street Studios in Manhattan. Rudin is the notoriously temperamental producer of major movies who has never let go of his love for the New York theater, or his investment in it. “Not da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-DA. But what those audiences would allow, would sit for — not easily at first, not without controversy and disdain, but gradually, and soon overwhelmingly — was the appearance of white men who had painted their faces to look black. He was going to burn it all into nothing. A rehearsal of “Shuffle Along” this month. Though this revival is set upon the plot of the original production of Shuffle Along, the second half of the title explains what the writers and producers are trying to do with the plot: “The year is 1921, and the jazzy musical Shuffle Along limps its way into New York. As they fight, their opponent for the mayoral position, virtuous Harry Walton, vows to end their corrupt regime ("I'm Just Wild about Harry"). Everybody’s hands floated at their sides. I believe the official terminology landed on by the news media was “racially insensitive.” Rudin and the co-­chairwoman of Sony at the time, Amy Pascal, were trading messages, and they somehow got onto the question of President Obama’s taste in movies, throwing out such recommendations as “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Ride Along,” the buddy-­cop movie that stars Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. HARRY WALTON: Your love for me is heav’nly beacon, Guiding me through love’s darkest night. An unusual article that appeared in The Boston Herald in 1922 describes her behavior on opening night, the first night of the epic run of “Shuffle” in New York. Sam wins with the help of a crooked campaign manager. Gee once had a huge nervous breakdown on a ship on the way to China. From there she went into musical theater: Cole and Johnson (they were another of the important teams, like Williams and Walker). McDonald singled out one facet of Gee’s personality — her “diva” qualities, like frequently canceling shows for illnesses real and imagined, for instance — as having been the thing that “frightened” her when taking the role. Same burned cork, same curly black wig. The venue was actually a converted lecture hall that lacked a proper stage or orchestra pit. “Yes,” he said, “but they were trying to figure out how to make America work for them. Outside the circus tent, in a tavern or a theater, he and Diamond would compete against each other in challenge matches. This isn’t reading backward onto their work a kind of artistic ambition it didn’t possess, but rather echoing what the new generation of black critics were saying at the time, when “Shuffle” came out. Some would dance; others would simply present themselves. It also has a star– Audra McDonald– who radiates on stage. It proved that white audiences would pay to see black musical comedies on Broadway. The blacks-­in-­blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply bizarre, and it was. . But his and Walker’s ambitions for their material grew during that first decade of the century. When the rehearsal was over, I spent an hour with Glover in a little side room off the rehearsal space. It’s questionable whether Truman even knew who wrote it. Diamond, knowing that Barnum’s wrath was coming, ran off. They were too busy being creative.” He’d said “savvy” but had also meant “self-­conscious.” “They lived,” he said, “inside that pure love of wanting to do the thing you do, the part of me that gets into show business.” But weren’t they also having to deal with all sorts of racism, even inside the world of the theater, especially inside it sometimes? His record of the song sold more than a hundred thousand copies, making him the first black recording artist ever to do so. If the slouch was noticeable, it could have reflected the fact that Glover, the genius child at 42, had been spending hundreds of hours bent forward and pacing around like this, staring down at other people’s feet. “Yes,” she said, “Eubie was from Baltimore.” That was true. Or rather, that’s the kind of simplistic explanation that an actual dance scholar would quibble with every word of, but it’s trueish. The great one took Gee on as an understudy and protégée, and her career took off. 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