The Erasure of Black Excellence in 1970s Musical Theatre
One of the gifts of teaching Broadway Refocused has been the opportunity to deep dive into the history of musical theatre. One of the ways that I want to teach or “re-tell” the history is to always include voices of the marginalized — people of color, women, queers and others.
One of the glaring issues as I started to research Unit 4: Black Musicals of the 1970s is that largely the history of these musicals are underrepresented in books, websites, Youtube videos, photos and overall content. I found that three books: Black Musical Theatre by Allen Woll, Black Broadway by Stewart F. Lane, and The Great White Way by Warren Hoffman really have the best material for understanding the black history of musical theatre. (Watch Hoffman’s talk: Race & American Musical)
Now, I have to note: all three of those authors are white men, two of which are Jewish. And, I, myself, a white queer man. This is a really important part of the overall story I’m telling. I am happy to say that these three men, with their privilege, found a platform to write about blacks and musical theatre, because I fear that a lot of the history would have been erased without these books. (Also to note: most of the articles in the newspapers and magazines in the 1970s were written by white male critics/journalists as well.) But I’m curious to see what the history books would look like if black historical stories were being told by black people.
From the research I’ve done I have learned that Broadway was thriving in new ways post-1965 — new stories, new faces/voices, and new ways of telling those stories were being produced on Broadway.
I would like to celebrate black excellence on Broadway. There were new Tony Award-winning musicals like The Wiz and Raisin and new all-black revivals like Hello Dolly! and Guys and Dolls which created new black stars like: Debbie Allen, Stephanie Mills and Pearl Bailey. And black excellence of the past, that included: Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake and Count Basie, were also highlighted in the revues of Ain’t Misbehavin’, Bubbling Brown Sugar and Eubie!. Also, black writers, composers, orchestrators, etc… had jobs on Broadway (though many of these black stories were written by white writers/composers and produced by white producers). In 1976, The New York Times celebrated the black talent boom of the 1970s. (See below for full article written by New York Times’ theatre critic, Mel Gussow - a white man)
The history books say something different though — they claim that The Golden Age of Musical Theatre was over. (“The Golden Age” is usually attributed to 1943-1965, though PBS categorizes it from 1943-1959, with 1960-1979 as “Changing Times”). You can’t look at Broadway in a vacuum — you need to see what was happening in New York City/America in a broader sense. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in voting affairs. Just a year before, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices, ended unequal application of voter registration requirements, and prohibited racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and in public accommodations.” (Wikipedia) These workplaces included Broadway.
What happened on Broadway in the late 60’s and into the 70’s? It changed. The sound changed. The people changed. There was a new crop of talent ready to perform and a new audience followed them to the theatre. (Beyond that, Broadway audiences were finally integrated; blacks and whites could finally sit together in the same theatre.)
Calling the years of 1943-1965 on Broadway, the “Golden Age” is really another way of saying “The White Age” on Broadway because that is exactly what it was. And yet we’ve even qualified it as “The Golden Age” which makes it sound like it was the better version of Broadway. It’s celebrating whiteness on Broadway, and using a nostalgic title to hide its racist story.
Personally, I’ve always heard that the 1970s were a terrible time for Broadway… with just a few shows that were hits: A Chorus Line, Annie, Chicago, and Sweeney Todd — but these were anomalies in a vast wasteland of bad musicals. You don’t hear about Raisin, Eubie!, Purlie and Bubbling Brown Sugar in musical theatre history — those stories and shows are glossed over — even barely mentioned. You don’t hear about the racism in the critics that panned The Wiz because they didn’t understand black culture. You don’t hear about how new audiences (specifically black audiences) came out to support these shows in droves. Why? Because Broadway is teeming with racism — even it’s telling of its own history. (Read more: White Supremacy and the Broadway Musical)
In 506-page book entitled Broadway: The American Musical there is one page (ONE PAGE!!!!) dedicated to the black musicals of the 1970s. There is one sentence about Bubbling Brown Sugar and Ain’t Misbehavin’. Its focus on that one-page was on The Wiz where it writes, “When it arrived on Broadway at the very beginning of 1975, it met with apathy from the largely white critical community and was on the verge of closing.” The writing is also apathetic as it doesn’t tell the whole story. The New York Amsterdam News wrote a scathing editorial calling these white critics out and asking their largely black audience to support the show. “The editorial explained that white critics might be unable to respond to a story “produced by Blacks, sung by Blacks, and seen predominantly by Blacks on opening night.” (Stewart Lane, Broadway Black, pg. 187) Black audiences listened and supported The Wiz and it ran for 1,672 performances — a massive hit of the 1970s, and also in the top 50 longest running musicals of all time. The Wiz literally changed how Broadway shows were marketed as it was one of the first to use television commercials (which you can see here).
Geoffrey Holder with his two Tony Awards from The Wiz
The Wiz was the first musical to be entirely created by black producers, artists, and performers and marketed for a black audience since 1921, 54 years later, when Shuffle Along hit Broadway. In 1975, Geoffrey Holder was the first black director to win Best Director of a Musical, as well as the first to win Best Costume Design in a Musical.
In Musical Theatre: A History by John Kenrick, he writes only three paragraphs about these black musicals, where he opines: “Despite decent runs, both Purlie and Raisin proved unprofitable.” And his final sentence about The Wiz: “A lavish 1978 movie version starring Diana Ross squashed much of the material’s charm.” Both paragraphs end with a disdain for the black musical. Both sentences make it sound that it was their fault for not turning a profit — maybe, it was because of racism. In any case, no mention that three black musicals in the 1970s won for BEST MUSICAL at The Tony Awards.
“The all-black Hello, Dolly! falls squarely between the assassinations of Malcom X (1965) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1968). At such a moment of unrest, how do we contextualize this frothy piece of entertainment? Perhaps even in 1967, there was a “feeling the producers had eschewed a black and white cast in order to avoid dealing with the issue of having an actor of one race playing a character romantically pursuing a character played by an actor of a different race.” It had only been a few months earlier, in June, when the Supreme Court in the case of Loving v. Virginia overturned anti-miscegenation laws with a unanimous decision. Unspoken or not, the era was pregnant with racial tensions and overtones that could not be ignored.” - Hoffman, The Great White Way, pg. 125
We learned in Unit 3, that South Pacific put interracial marriage into the national conversation, and could even be part of the history that helped “frame” racism as “taught” and “learned” as opposed to something that just happens. In the history books, we celebrate this show, what it means, and how it was almost a decade before the Civil Rights Era, but we actually didn’t see this happening on Broadway in reality. Still, in the late 1960’s, this was something producers didn’t want to navigate. It wasn’t until 1973, in the revival of The Pajama Game, that we saw a change in casting where two leads were cast as an interracial couple (specifically meaning outside of the story-telling, like we saw in South Pacific). Unfortunately, it wasn’t well received by critics and audiences alike, running only 65 performances. I question: is it because the audience didn’t accept the interracial couple? Was it because the writers didn’t update the book to reflect what was on stage? Was it because it was just poorly executed? Probably, all of the above.
In the all-black version of Guys and Dolls, Jessica Harris claimed in the New York Amsterdam News: “Guys and Dolls is not a Black production in the sense of The Wiz or Me and Bessie. It is simply a damned good production of Guys and Dolls with a cast of Black performers.” This anti-racist review was in an all-black newspaper, while white critics had a different opinion. “The success of the production seemed to be dependent on the race of the reviewer, with black writers embracing the work as a liberating example of color-blind casting and white lamenting the incongruity of African American actors into a show that was White and Jewish at its core”, wrote Warren Hoffman in The Great White Way. (pg. 134)
“The main thing overlooked in the entire discussion of color-blind or nontraditional casting is whiteness itself, because so many fail to recognize it as the normalizing force it is in society and theater.”
The Great White Way - Warren Hoffman, pg. 141
That “whiteness” was challenged on and off Broadway in the late 1960s and moving into the 1970s. It’s important to note that Times Square was not the nicest of places in the late 1960s/early 1970s — “Times Square was an urban war zone, saturated with seedy adult book shops, illegal drugs, and prostitution. The once glamorous theatres of 42nd Street were now shabby movie grind houses,” Kenrick writes. He continues, “However tough the times were, the 1970s turned out to be one of the most exciting decades the musical theatre had known.” I actually believe Kenrick, but the problem is, he continues to normalize the narrative that “whiteness” is normalized in his book by not giving black musicals, creatives and performers any space in the narrative.
It’s interesting to note that the term “Golden Age of Broadway” has recently been questioned, asking if we are living through a new version of this Golden Age. On Playbill, noted musical historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper stated: “Musical theatre is a larger part of the mainstream entertainment zeitgeist than ever before. Does this wave of prominence for the musical mean that we are in a new Golden Age—a “Platinum Age”—of musical theatre?” She mentions diverse shows like Hamilton, In the Heights, and RENT and how movie and TV musicals have found a new stride in the 2000’s, but doesn’t conclude in the conversation that this new representation is one of the reasons we are hitting a new “platinum age”. In an American Theatre article, writer Suzy Evans, does correlate this “new golden age of musical theatre” to diversity, new voices and stories being told, and new audiences coming to the theatre.
Amber Gray, right, and the cast of "Hadestown" at the National Theatre in London in 2018. (Photo © Helen Maybanks)
“Both A Strange Loop’s Jackson and Ain’t Too Proud’s Morisseau stress the importance of diverse voices and writers entering the field, as both gender parity and racial diversity have been sorely lacking in the field historically, and right up to the present. Jackson made sure the actors who populate his cast all identify as Black and queer, and Morisseau hopefully cites a few Black female colleagues working in the form, including Lynn Nottage (The Secret Life of Bees, as well as the stalled Michael Jackson jukebox musical Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough) and Katori Hall (one of the writers of Tina). There’s also Kirsten Childs, whose Bella: An American Tall Tale received a co-world premiere at Playwrights Horizons and Dallas Theater Center in 2017.
Musicals written by more diverse voices are particularly important for young people, as shows that do manage to make it to Broadway are usually directly minted into the repertoire and go on to be produced at community theatres and high schools, giving young people roles they can see themselves in.”
Suzy Evans - American Theatre Magazine
I think Ms. Evan’s point about musicals written with diverse voices are important to young people is incredibly poignant. Part of how Broadway will change is with a new generation of voices that mirror the diversity (on and off stage) in our country. These young people learning about musical theatre in youth theatre, high school, and community theatre will be the future of Broadway. I challenge the teachers and directors of educational youth theatre to put diversity as the most important part of their mission statement, casting and teaching.
While there has been a lot of diversity and inclusion work on Broadway in the recent past, I would not be able to call it the “platinum age” just yet. Until real change has been enacted, then I would wait to brand this as a “new or better age” because it’s just another way of upholding “whiteness” and the racist traditions of the past. Austin Channing Brown, a speaker, writer, and media producer providing leadership on racial justice in America writes in her book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness: *(I’ve added an emphasis on Broadway in brackets.)
“When an organization [Broadway] confuses diversity or inclusion with reconciliation, it often shows up in an obsession with numbers. How many Black people are in the [cast] photo? Has the 20 percent quota been met, so that we can call ourselves multicultural? Does our publication [Broadway season] have enough stories written by people of color? Are there enough people of color on the TV show [cast or creatives]? But without people of color in key positions [producers/theatre owners], influencing topics of conversation, content, direction, and vision, whatever diversity is included is still essentially white — it just adds people of color like sprinkles on top. The cake is still vanilla.”
Broadway still has a lot of work to do. Its cake is still vanilla, albeit with more sprinkles of color than in the past, but it’s still very much vanilla. And this also includes its history. I’ve seen first-hand the white-washed telling of musical theatre history and specifically the lack of coverage of black musicals of the 1970s. Some incredibly successful black Broadway shows were produced in the 1970s against the odds of whiteness, the racism of the white critics, and the struggles of seedy 1970s Times Square.
These black musicals were triumphs — black excellence in stories, performances, creation, and producing.
They told stories of black pasts, as well as black futures. They should be upheld in musical theatre canon as a new version of the “golden age” of Broadway… or even the better version of Broadway. Because it wasn’t until then that diverse and inclusive stories were starting to be told on Broadway. That’s how I want to look at the past and see the musicals of the 1970s. That’s what we all should be celebrating.
