The Scottsboro Boys

[deliasherman]

I'd love to write a long and thoughtful piece about this play, about rage and art and history and how to make it all palatable enough to a modern audience so that they'll take in what they need to hear and not simply walk out at intermission (or in the middle of a production number, since The Scottsboro Boys is played without intermission).  I'll

Comments

[tithenai]

John Cullum, the only white member of the cast...all the Boys came on, in full black-face, to tapdance and sing the bare, horrible facts of their lives after prison.

This part confused me... The black actors came out in black-face?

I had never heard of either the play or the event it's based on. Thank you for the write up.

[deliasherman]

Yep. That's what they did. Black actors in black face. It was harrowing. And very effective, since the next thing they did was wipe it all off and watch, gravely, while Cullum did the cakewalk all by himself, essentially isolating himself in his refusal to understand what we'd just seen.

One of the hardest things this play did was to establish the conventions of a dead theatrical form at the same time it was undercutting and mocking them.

[vschanoes]

Yes, black actors in minstrel shows wore blackface. Spike Lee's Bamboozled is a particularly effective/instructive movie to see on this topic.

[tithenai]

Yesterday was a Wikipedia-based exercise in being horrified, let me tell you. I'd never even heard of a minstrel show before this post. I've been up to my neck in British Romantic appropriations of bardic/minstrel figures in literature, and had never heard of the word used differently.

I've got to look Bamboozled up.

[hilleviw]

This description recollected to me the experience of seeing Wozzeck done by San Francisco Opera. I had been given an orchestra ticket, so I was surrounded by people who had paid over $100 each for their seats. The discomfort in the house was palpable. During intermission the mood was sober, after the intermission the house was half empty. And yet, for those who stayed, it seemed many had a transformative experience. The conversations on which I eavesdropped on the way out tended to be about the yawning chasm between rich and poor, about effective philanthropy and volunteerism.

Thanks for the reminder that art doesn't have to be easy and comfortable to be good, and maybe needs not to be comfortable to be great.

[deliasherman]

I've read Wozzeck, but I've never seen it produced. I'd love to. It would be worth any amount of discomfort.

[negothick]

Amazing--Kander and Ebb have now done for America exactly what they did for Weimar Germany in Cabaret: there, too, they used an old form--the German cabaret of Weill and Brecht--to tell a story about racism. And there, too, the character of the Master of Ceremonies--played on Broadway by a Jew, Joel Grey--served as mediator, and instead of being the audience's comfortable surrogate, he represented the audience's worst fears of gender indeterminacy and collusion with evil.
I saw Cabaret in its first run on Broadway when I was about 15 and it changed my life.
I am thrilled that Kander and Ebb produced another seriously life-transforming work. But speaking of interstitiality--Ebb died in 2004. Did he complete the lyrics before he died? If so, has it really taken over 6 years to bring the play to Broadway? And it's been 44 years since Cabaret.

[deliasherman]

I knew about the Cabaret connection--I just forgot. And of course, you're right. This is clearly their idiom. It's just easier to take when it's cabaret and those nasty, evil Nazis who we all love to hate rather than our own chequered past.

This was Kander and Ebb's last collaboration before Ebb died. It wasn't produced until spring of this year, off-Broadway (where it got very good reviews), then had a short run at the Guthrie before coming to Broadway. The Wall Street Journal hated it. At one point, there were protesters (who hadn't seen it) picketing the theater and calling it racist. Maybe they should have waited another few years to mount it.

*sigh*

[17catherines]

This sounds amazing. Thanks for writing about it.

[la_marquise_de_]

That sounds extraordinary and heart-breaking and beautiful.