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African-American musical theater includes late 19th- and early 20th-centurymusical theater productions byAfrican Americans inNew York City andChicago. Actors from troupes such as theLafayette Players also crossed over into film. ThePekin Theatre in Chicago was a popular and influential venue.[1] Various theater actors crossed over intoAfrican American cinema.
TheAfrican Grove Theatre opened in New York City in 1821. It was subjected to harassment and intimidation, eventually closing.[citation needed]
Before the late 1890s, the image portrayed ofAfrican Americans on Broadway was a "secondhand vision of black life created byEuropean-American performers." Stereotyped "coon songs" were popular, andblackface was common. Minstrel shows were often performed in early history and were inspired by black music. These shows were first performed by white people who used blackface in the 1800s. Many of these performers wore old ripped clothing, some stolen from slaves, to "represent" the enslaved African Americans. Along with the clothing, the white performers portrayed black people as lazy, thieves, and dumb.[citation needed]
TheHyers Sisters have been credited with creating the first American musicals in the 1870s. Trained opera singers, they toured the United States for 20 years, performing 'comic operas' that broke with minstrel show stereotypes and told stories about slavery and freedom.[2] Another pioneering Black touring group wasSherman H. Dudley'sSmart Set Company, whose musical comedies in the early 1900s bridged the gap between old Minstrel-style stereotypes and more upscale, authentic and self-referential humour.[3]
Will Marion Cook andBob Cole brought black-written musical comedy to Broadway in 1898. Cook'sClorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, an hour-long sketch that was the first all-black show to play in a prestigious Broadway house,Casino Theatre's Roof Garden. Cole'sA Trip to Coontown was the first full-length New York musical comedy written, directed and performed exclusively by blacks. The approach of the two composers were diametrically opposed: Cole believed that African Americans should try to compete with European Americans by proving their ability to act similarly on- and offstage, while Cook thought African Americans should not imitate European Americans but instead create their own style.[citation needed]
Bob Cole and brothersJohn Rosamond Johnson andJames Weldon Johnson focused on elevating the lyrical sophistication of African American songs. Their first collaboration was "Louisiana Lize", a love song written in a new lyrical style that left out thewatermelons, razors, and "hot mamas" typical of earlier "coon songs."[4]
Cole and the Johnson brothers went on to create musicals such asThe Belle of Bridgeport,The Red Moon (withJoe Jordan),The Shoo-Fly Regiment,In Newport,Humpty Dumpty, andSally in Our Alley (featuring Bob Cole's "Under The Bamboo Tree"). Bob Cole's suicide in 1911 ended "one of the promising musical comedy teams yet seen on Broadway".[citation needed]
Pat Chappelle was in the theater business and helped organize touring vaudeville shows with numerous performers.[citation needed]
Bert Williams andGeorge Walker, called the "Two Real Coons", found fame in 1896 with a musical farce calledThe Gold Bug. The duo's performance of thecakewalk was successful. Williams met Walker inSan Francisco in 1893, while they played Dahomeyans in an exhibit of theCalifornia Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. They played different venues while putting together their act.[citation needed]
Williams and Walker were dropped from "Isham's Octoroons", one of the first African American companies to break from the minstrel style performance.[5] They then put together a number of small productions includingA Lucky Coon,Sons of Ham, andThe Policy Players, but their ultimate goal was to produce and star in their own Broadway musical. So they thought back to the times inSan Francisco and producedIn Dahomey (1903) alongsidePaul Laurence Dunbar,Jesse A. Shipp, and Will Marion Cook.Abyssinia (1906) andBandanna Land (1908) were also significant parts of Williams and Walker's claim to fame. Their dreams of stardom come to life and they took musicals in a new direction, back toAfrica. George Walker died during the run ofBandanna Land and his wifeAda Overton Walker substituted for him during its final week.[6]
By 1911,Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, and George Walker had died. Will Marion Cook and the Johnson brothers, James and J. Rosamond, had pursued new careers and Bert Williams moved to theZiegfeld Follies and black musical theater went into a hiatus.[7]
In 1915ragtime composerScott Joplin attempted to stage anoperaTreemonisha in Harlem but the show was a financial and critical failure and Joplin was ruined and retreated into retirement until his death in 1917.[citation needed]
In May 1921, the surprising hitShuffle Along made its way toNew York City with almost $18,000 in debt. "One of the most popular black shows of the 1920s; began to tinker with the pattern of segregation". The creators of the astronomical point in history are The Dixie Duo,Noble Sissle andEubie Blake, who met at a party inBaltimore,Maryland in 1915. Their career was brief but successful. "Shuffle Along was a milestone in the development of the black musical, and it became the model by which all black musicals were judged until well into the 1930s."[8]F. E. Miller andAubrey Lyles, who wrote the book forShuffle Along (1921) had met in 1906, and began performing at the "Pekin Theater Stock Company" nearChicago from 1906 to 1909, along with other African American stars such asHarry Lawrence Freeman.[citation needed]
In 1921, Miller and Lyles appeared in ashort film made inPhotokinema, asound-on-disc process, singing their composition "De Ducks", while Sissle and Blake made three films in theLee De ForestPhonofilmsound-on-film process in 1923. These short films are a record of music similar to the work these four men were doing on stage at the time...[citation needed]
Rang Tang premiered July 12, 1927, onBroadway at theRoyale Theater and ran for 119 performances, including a 14-week overrun, finishing at theMajestic October 24, 1927.[citation needed]
In 1926, white producer and directorLew Leslie staged the first of a popular series ofBlackbirds revues with an all-black cast. Leslie mounted a series ofBlackbirds revues, which ran in 1926, 1928, 1930, 1933 and 1939. The series were named afterFlorence Mills theme song, "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird," a thinly veiled protest against racial injustice, which she first sung in theDixie to Broadway show in 1924.[9]
TheBlackbirds of 1926 featured Florence Mills,Edith Wilson andJohnny Hudgins, and had a successful six week run atThe Harlem Alhambra inHarlem, New York, before moving overseas to star in theLes Ambassadeurs inParis, the Casino-Kursaal inOstend (Belgium) and theLondon Pavilion.[10][11] TheBlackbirds of 1928, featured such talents as singersAdelaide Hall andAida Ward, dancer extraordinaireBill "Bojangles" Robinson and top-flight funnymanTim Moore. FurtherBlackbirds revues were staged in 1930 withEthel Waters,Buck and Bubbles, andFlournoy Miller, in 1933 withEdith Wilson, and in 1939 withLena Horne and Tim Moore.[12]
The key to Leslie's success was the exceptional talent he found. “Leslie managed to build his black revues around one or more dynamic performers, who could carry a modest show to success.”[13] Although these productions showcased black talent, they were almost completely created by white writers and composers. In an interview, Leslie made a remarkable claim that “They (white men) understand the colored man better than he does himself. Colored composers excel atspirituals, but their other songs are just 'what' (dialect for 'white') songs with Negro words."[14]
George Gershwin'sPorgy and Bess (1935) – starring Will Marion Cook's wifeAbbie Mitchell among many others – is the most famous black musical of the 1930s. It is called a black musical because of the African American cast, even though neither the music or plot is of the “Negro inspiration” like the creators proclaim. "Porgy and Bess marked the nadir in the history of black musical comedy, symbolizing the end of tradition and experimentation in black musical theater on Broadway".[15] This also led theWorks Progress Administration to start theFederal Theater Project that established the Negro Unit with programs in 22 cities. This gave a new break to the struggling artists. The Negro Unit avoided musical comedies, but had a few musicals with black cast including Eubie Blake'sSwing It, which closed in 1937 and lessened hope for theFederal Theater Project.[citation needed]
However, one black musical comedy succeeded and twisted the new realm of musical theater,The Swing Mikado (1937), a "modernization" ofGilbert and Sullivan’s classic operetta,The Mikado. This was followed byThe Hot Mikado (1939).[16] Another modern version of the classics wasOscar Hammerstein II's Broadway musicalCarmen Jones (1943), a version ofGeorges Bizet’sCarmen with an all-black cast.[17]
In the late 20th and 21st century, predominantly Black musical theatre shows became more common. Notable shows includeOnce on This Island,The Color Purple,MJ the Musical,Dreamgirls,The Lion King,Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,Ain't Too Proud,Passing Strange, andThe Wiz.Sister Act is led by a Black character whileHairspray features multiple Black characters, ensemble members and a story about integration.[citation needed]Michael R. Jackson'sA Strange Loop won thePulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020, becoming the first African American musical to win this award.[18]
