[Please note that this is actually Friday’s fact, but I write these at work and we had a network outage so instead of fighting with my internet to get this fact sent out, I went home. And I don’t work on weekends kids.]
In the time before Uber, I went out with some friends/friends of friends on a Wednesday night for a birthday party because at the time I probably had around $20 in my wallet and I figured I couldn’t do too much damage on a school night with that amount of money. But what I didn’t account for is that these friends of friends would cover me [if you know me at all, you know why this was a mistake. If you DON’T know me, you should never underestimate my ability to procure a free drank], so what I thought was gonna be quick drop in where I had a beer and maybe a shot ended up being several rounds of Irish car bombs (the beverage, although to be fair, I definitely felt like wreckage and devastation the next day) and every variation of a Long Island Ice Tea (Long Beach, Tokyo…’member when you were VERY YOUNG AND STUPID and you mixed liquors? Me neither because if you drink like that you mostly black out).
And then, I stumbled home and slept for 10 minutes [I’m not really sure if it was REALLY 10 minutes or it FELT like 10 minutes] and went to work the next morning. TO BE FAIR, I did regret it deeply and at the end of the workday, I practically DOVE into my bed to make up for staying out all night drinking the day before.
But now I’m an adult (LOLOLOL….I am too you guys) and going out on a Wednesday leaves me V close to the same amount of tired, minus the hangover and smelling like the inside of a Jameson bottle. And this past Wednesday, I went to The Pantages to see a musical. I went to see The Wiz who lives in OZ but has taken up temporary residence in Hollywood. I’ve never seen a staged version of The Wiz IN PERSON. Although Imma be honest and tell y’all that I haven’t seen a version of The Wiz that I didn’t like including the one that aired in 2015.
DID YOU KNOW…that along with other musicals including Purlie (1971) and Raisin (1974), The Wiz was a breakthrough for Broadway, a large-scale big-budget musical featuring an all-Black cast? It laid the foundation for later African-American hits such as Bubbling Brown Sugar (okay. This isn’t the musical but it is my SOLE reference for this song), Dreamgirls and Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies.
But there isn’t a foundation without a first. And you know why I’m here. To tell y’all how we got alllll the way to The Wiz’s all Black cast (headed for Broadway) from the FIRST BROADWAY MUSICAL*, which. Was named The Black Crook and I dunno man, Black is RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME, I feel like they missed an opportunity to do something but as always I’m sure the answer is racism one way or another (it is because this was produced in 1866).
Anyway. The first all-black hit Broadway show, that is ALSO credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s was called Shuffle Along. The show premiered at the 63rd Street Music Hall in 1921, running for 504 performances, a remarkably successful span for that decade. It launched the careers of Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Fredi Washington and Paul Robeson, and was so popular it caused “curtain time traffic jams”.
Shuffle Along is a musical composed by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissle and a book written by the comedy duo Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The show’s writers were African-American Vaudeville veterans who first met in 1920 at a NAACP benefit. None had ever written a musical, or even appeared on Broadway, and promoters were skeptical that Black people would like to see themselves reflected in the entertainment they consumed written and produced shows would appeal to Broadway audiences. After finding a small source of funding, Shuffle Along toured New Jersey and Pennsylvania. However, with its limited budget, it was difficult to meet travel and production expenses. Cast members were rarely paid, and were “trapped out of town when the box-office receipts could not cover train fare”.
The plot of Shuffle Along was based on Millers’ and Lyles’s previous play, “The Mayor of Dixie.”, and in Shuffle Along, they incorporated “their well-beloved characters that they had been playing for years in vaudeville”. Breaking with minstrel tradition, the principal characters wore tuxedos, conveying their dignity. In minstrel shows, characters in tuxedos and blackface typically played the “Zip Coon” type, a stock character which mocked black people who were free from slavery. Shuffle Along rejected this image by presenting its characters as community-oriented men seeking to run for mayor of their city. Furthermore, I would like to point out for BLACK PEOPLE in blackface allows them to a) access white audiences in the first place, in a medium white people are comfortable with and so can maybe hear/tolerate important, though provocative messages and b) stage a show that is at its core about an election. And we know that electoral and thus political rights are being had long been stripped from women and Black people 1921 was not a safe time to discuss voting rights. But they are able to talk about the universal rights of all human beings under the “safety” of the ebony paint.
[THIS IS ME “BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL” TO STARE DIRECTLY AT YOU IN 2024 AKA AN ELECTION YEAR]
[This is also a reminder that even if you don’t want to vote for a president, SMALLER ELECTIONS COUNT TOO]
I’d argue that “safety” is relative because Black people were definitely still getting lynched in 1921 and the Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching Bill was finally passed in 2022. I’d ALSO like to say that the actual definition for lynching is to kill someone for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial, so what I’m saying that if you’re any sort of attention to world at large, you’ll note that lynching is still very much legal if you have on a certain outfit. That is generally blue.
Back to my fact. According to Time magazine, Shuffle Along was the first Broadway musical that prominently featured syncopated jazz music, and the first to feature a chorus of professional female dancers. They incorporated music and visual spectacle with the preexisting narrative to create a unique show. While stereotypes were indeed present, Sissle and Blake worked “within a parallel performance form,” replacing “the negative stereotypes with a vastly more positive image.”. In the end, Shuffle Along earned $9 million from its original Broadway production and three touring companies, an unusual sum in its time.
*closes Wikipedia*
And now I’m about to go see if I can find a copy of Shuffle Along to watch because it was on Broadway in 2016 (and was snubbed like WHOA and I wonder why? lolololol….no I don’t) and maybe there’s a bootleg copy so I can see what all the hubbub is about, bub.
Happy Monday! See you the next time I write a fact!
*The Black Crook has cautiously been identified as the first popular piece that conforms to the modern notion of a musical.
Yeah I said it 