[Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater By Tad Simons August 8, 2010 Mpls.St.Paul Magazine http://blogs.mspmag.com/themorningafter/2010/08/review-the-scottsboro-boys-the.html Is The Scottsboro Boys-the final musical from the legendary writing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Ebb died in 2004), who gave us Chicago, Cabaret, and Kiss of the Spider Woman-Broadway's next big hit? Or, is it a shamelessly racist piece of claptrap that traffics in every imaginable negative stereotype for the sole purpose of entertaining rooms full of wealthy white people? Or, is it the most outrageously subversive play ever to hit a Guthrie stage: a shocking, viciously satirical, brutally honest flaying of American culture that-in the long tradition of jesters who use humor to tell the truth to the king-lambastes, lampoons, and blasphemes in order to reveal deeper, more disgraceful truths that Americans might otherwise ignore? Or is it all of these things? And then some? These are the sorts of questions likely to be spinning around in your head after sitting through The Scottsboro Boys, an unlikely musical built around the tragic true story of nine black men from Alabama in 1931who were wrongly accused of rape and spent years in jail waiting for the legal system to exonerate them. The Scottsboro saga is rightly regarded as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American jurisprudence, though it is also viewed by some as an evolutionary leap for the American justice system, if only because the men weren't immediately lynched. Depending on how one looks at it, what happened to the Scottsboro boys was either a travesty of justice or evidence of the relative fairness, however imperfect, of the American legal system. (After many years, most of the charges were dropped and the men paroled, but their lives were ruined.) As the kids like to say, it's complicated. Complicating things much further is the musical itself, which chooses to present this unfortunate episode in history as a minstrel show, the pre-vaudevillian art form that died out because of its inherent racism. You can't rinse a minstrel show clean of racism, but you can use it as a prism to explore certain aspects of race-and, though it's tremendously risky (and not entirely successful), that's what The Scottsboro Boys attempts to do. The show wears its heresies like a badge. It comes complete with black actors in blackface, black actors portraying white people, and disconcertingly jaunty tunes about such entertaining topics as frying in an electric chair and the homey comforts of slave life. White people are vilified. Black people are skewered. Jews are mocked. Southern people are slandered. On the surface, this may be a shiny, polished musical with upbeat tunes and lots of unexpected humor, but burbling beneath that surface charm is an angry, disturbing energy that's difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. It's as if the writers set out to turn every cultural taboo about race on its head, spin it around a few times, and spit it back in your face with a vengeance. The Scottsboro Boys isn't created merely to entertain; it is engineered to send you out into the night full of ambivalence and conflicted feelings about what you just saw. In any given scene, you might be thinking, as I did, Oh, here are bunch of black guys in blackface singing a happy song. But wait, I'm supposed to be disgusted by the very thought of black entertainers acting this way. But strangely, I'm not as disgusted as I should be, because it's just part of the show, and the actors know what they're doing. None of them is being forced to act like that. Then again, if these guys wanted to be in this show and get paid, dressing and acting like that had to be a prerequisite for the job. But if this really is as crazily racist as it looks, why would any self-respecting actor even participate in it? In this and many other ways, The Scottsboro Boys is a show that smiles at you big and bright while it's stabbing you repeatedly in the back with a large, culturally lethal knife. That is its genius, and also its greatest liability. How does this peculiar mind-swirl work? The show starts out with the performers hopping happily down the aisles promising the audience an entertaining show with a happy ending. There are a couple of deliriously cheerful song-and-dance numbers, then the nine boys get arrested and the real story begins. One of the boys asks if he can tell the truth this time, and the Interlocutor (played by David A. Brinkley) grants him permission. The actors inform the audience that the white parts, including the white women, will be played by black men. From there, The Scottsboro Boys goes into absurdist overdrive. The town sheriff (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo) is portrayed as a bigoted idiot, the women who claim they have been raped are portrayed as attention-seeking ditzes, the boys' defense lawyer is portrayed as a drunk and a clown (complete with bulbous
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
I hate musicals to begin with. And opera too. I can't stand any of them. OK, I did like the movie CABARET. But otherwise I think Mel Brooks summed it all up in Springtime for Hitler . . . until he turned his movie into a musical (which I saw and admittedly enjoyed, with stubborn reservations). The conclusion that not much has changed since the '30s is off base, but it's true that mainstream liberalism is honest about the past as long as it's the distant past and not the present. This frames most of its documentary efforts (Ken Burns and others'). I don't trust reviewers as a rule, but as I am prejudiced against musicals, my initial reaction is: (1) WTF! (2) I'm amazed that anyone would do anything with the Scottsboro Boys now, and a musical, no less. I think though that someone should do a musical about the Tea Party. Camptown crackers have a ball . . . doo dah, doo dah . . . On 9/14/2010 10:29 AM, c b wrote: Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater By Tad Simons August 8, 2010 Mpls.St.Paul Magazine http://blogs.mspmag.com/themorningafter/2010/08/review-the-scottsboro-boys-the.html Is The Scottsboro Boys-the final musical from the legendary writing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Ebb died in 2004), who gave us Chicago, Cabaret, and Kiss of the Spider Woman-Broadway's next big hit? Or, is it a shamelessly racist piece of claptrap that traffics in every imaginable negative stereotype for the sole purpose of entertaining rooms full of wealthy white people? Or, is it the most outrageously subversive play ever to hit a Guthrie stage: a shocking, viciously satirical, brutally honest flaying of American culture that-in the long tradition of jesters who use humor to tell the truth to the king-lambastes, lampoons, and blasphemes in order to reveal deeper, more disgraceful truths that Americans might otherwise ignore? Or is it all of these things? And then some? These are the sorts of questions likely to be spinning around in your head after sitting through The Scottsboro Boys, an unlikely musical built around the tragic true story of nine black men from Alabama in 1931who were wrongly accused of rape and spent years in jail waiting for the legal system to exonerate them. The Scottsboro saga is rightly regarded as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American jurisprudence, though it is also viewed by some as an evolutionary leap for the American justice system, if only because the men weren't immediately lynched. Depending on how one looks at it, what happened to the Scottsboro boys was either a travesty of justice or evidence of the relative fairness, however imperfect, of the American legal system. (After many years, most of the charges were dropped and the men paroled, but their lives were ruined.) As the kids like to say, it's complicated. Complicating things much further is the musical itself, which chooses to present this unfortunate episode in history as a minstrel show, the pre-vaudevillian art form that died out because of its inherent racism. You can't rinse a minstrel show clean of racism, but you can use it as a prism to explore certain aspects of race-and, though it's tremendously risky (and not entirely successful), that's what The Scottsboro Boys attempts to do. The show wears its heresies like a badge. It comes complete with black actors in blackface, black actors portraying white people, and disconcertingly jaunty tunes about such entertaining topics as frying in an electric chair and the homey comforts of slave life. White people are vilified. Black people are skewered. Jews are mocked. Southern people are slandered. On the surface, this may be a shiny, polished musical with upbeat tunes and lots of unexpected humor, but burbling beneath that surface charm is an angry, disturbing energy that's difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. It's as if the writers set out to turn every cultural taboo about race on its head, spin it around a few times, and spit it back in your face with a vengeance. The Scottsboro Boys isn't created merely to entertain; it is engineered to send you out into the night full of ambivalence and conflicted feelings about what you just saw. In any given scene, you might be thinking, as I did, Oh, here are bunch of black guys in blackface singing a happy song. But wait, I'm supposed to be disgusted by the very thought of black entertainers acting this way. But strangely, I'm not as disgusted as I should be, because it's just part of the show, and the actors know what they're doing. None of them is being forced to act like that. Then again, if these guys wanted to be in this show and get paid, dressing and acting like that had to be a prerequisite for the job. But if this really is as crazily racist as it looks, why would any self-respecting actor even participate in it? In this and many other ways, The Scottsboro Boys is a show that smiles at you
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
, Ralph Dumain I think though that someone should do a musical about the Tea Party. Camptown crackers have a ball . . . doo dah, doo dah . . . ^^^ CB: That's funny. Second song for Tea Party musical Oh I wish O was in the land of cotton...O away, O away from the white house today ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
Oops , sorry , here's another musical. They came to Bert's Market place with Bill Meyer, who plays there every Thursday. Charles ^^^ Mysterious murder is not 'Forgotten' http://www.forgottenshow.net/DeGain.htm By Vivian DeGain Special to the Daily Tribune Royal Oak Daily Tribune Photos 1 and 2 by Rosh Sillars September 9, 2005 Sometimes a mystery gets easier to solve with time, when fears can settle down and distance allows clear judgment. Actor and Huntington Woods resident Davis Gloff offers the example of the 1962 murder of civil rights advocate Medgar Evers and how it was 1994 before a jury convicted a prime suspect. When it comes to race, class and the bitter struggles of the pre-union automotive factory workers, perhaps a death at the River Rouge plant in 1936 could be such a mystery, that of the minister, labor organizer and radio broadcaster the Rev. Lewis Bradford. His death was called an accident at the time --but now, piecing together old testimonial evidence and a coroner's report-- it seems more like a murder, especially to musician Steve Jones, who has a personal interest in Bradford's story. Jones, a distant relative of Bradford who studies labor history took years to gather stories from his own family treasure chests, as well as to trace historical information about Bradford's death through newspaper clippings and other period documents. Now, in the only way I could, Jones relates the story in 25 songs woven together in a powerful and dynamic production that he describes as a jazz opera. His work, the musical drama Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant, is based on his investigation about the death of his great-uncle. The composer said he developed Forgotten with the help of director Elise Bryant, his brother Peter (who wrote the first Lewis Bradford song), and cousins and aunts who retold family stories and recovered Bradford's long-forgotten dusty diary in an attic. The result is a knockout. The lyrics, harmonies and a top-rate cast bring the story alive with a brilliant performance. Jones and Bryant share many common interests. He earned his BA in Labor Studies from the University of Maryland, where he lives today. His colleague, Bryant, is a teacher at the National Labor College-George Meany Center, and had directed labor theater for almost 20 years. Jones had the blood connection to Bradford. Bryant grew up in Detroit and her father worked at the Rouge Plant for 40 years. I could have started writing this story in a more general way to focus on the issues. But it is the specifics that make a story better and richer, Jones said. For instance, Elise told me that in Detroit, automotive workers identify themselves by the name of their particular plant, more than with the company name. The personal and individual become the universal. Just ask Forgotten cast member Gloff, who portrays former Shrine of the Little Flower pastor Father Charles Coughlln, a controversial right-wing priest and influential radio broadcaster with a record of radical and anti-Semitic viewpoints. Gloff said his own father, Leroy Gloff, only survived the Depression because of the help and generosity of The Salvation Army and National Guard. Like so many of that generation, the parents of Davis Gloff and his wife either were born in Detroit or came to Detroit to get a better life through the factory jobs that Henry Ford offered for $5 a day. In Forgotten, Gloff's real family are honored as their photos are projected on a screen behind the set, along with photos of many other cast family members. The final piece, 'We Remember You,' is a tribute to all those who have gone before, Gloff said. We mention the names in the show of (workers) who have been killed in the labor movement in Detroit, but we also celebrate the lives of the people who went before us individually. At the outset of the show we were asked to bring in pictures of our family members for that. I brought in pictures of my parents and (his wife) Donna's too. The collage at the end is the collection of those pictures. They are color and black and white, old and not so old, from many generations, but all people we have loved who are no longer with us. The (collage) runs as we sing We remember you. What you've been, what you've done will not be forgotten. I'm personally glad that I don't actually sing in that number, because just hearing that song and seeing those pictures makes me cry and I've never sung very well while I was crying. I really don't know how the others do it. I respect them very much for being able to hold it together as they do that number. He does belt out the tunes as Coughlin though. Gloff's baritone fills the stage in a song titled after the Hour of Power radio show, and again in a point-counterpoint trio called, Radio, Guns and Money. The radio angle is another that Gloff really relates to personally. He was an on-alr personality at WQRS 105.1 for eight years
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
I rarely comment on this list. But if you ever get a chance to see Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins, don't miss it. There are few musicals about presidential assassins, and Sondheim is always good for a light tune set to really heavy words. On 2010-09-14, at 11:24 , c b wrote: , Ralph Dumain I think though that someone should do a musical about the Tea Party. Camptown crackers have a ball . . . doo dah, doo dah . . . ^^^ CB: That's funny. Second song for Tea Party musical Oh I wish O was in the land of cotton...O away, O away from the white house today ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Review: The Scottsboro Boys @ The Guthrie Theater
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Bill White bill.wh...@griggsinst.com wrote: I rarely comment on this list. ^^^ CB: Good to hear from you But if you ever get a chance to see Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins, don't miss it. There are few musicals about presidential assassins, and Sondheim is always good for a light tune set to really heavy words. On 2010-09-14, at 11:24 , c b wrote: , Ralph Dumain I think though that someone should do a musical about the Tea Party. Camptown crackers have a ball . . . doo dah, doo dah . . . ^^^ CB: That's funny. Second song for Tea Party musical Oh I wish O was in the land of cotton...O away, O away from the white house today ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
