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| The Wicked Witch of the West in the film THE WIZARD OF OZ, and Andre de Shields as The Wiz. |
Although its tryouts were troubled by other creative issues, "Golden Boy" eventually opened as a slick, stark, well-intentioned piece of Broadway craftsmanship, with a dynamite, once-in-a-lifetime performance by Davis at its center. Despite its ethical message, the show still wowed audiences for its sheer performance quality, and Elkins insulated Davis and the company from the various death threats and other hostilities leveled against the musical. Soon after the opening, Martin Luther King Jr. came to see it. He admired its message, particularly a number called "No More":
Well, you had your way!
No more!
Well, it ain't your day
No more!
Well, I'm standing up,
I ain't on the floor.
I ain't bowin' down
No more!
The early '70s saw the emergence of several shows where the creative staff and the cast were predominately African American. There were nonlinear musicals that put the urban black experience front and center, like Melvin van Peebles' "Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death" (1971), with its undercurrent of social protest, and Vinette Carroll's more celebratory "Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope" (1972), both nurtured by the Black Arts movement. There were more traditional adaptations of earlier black plays, such as "Purlie" (1970), which launched the careers of Cleavon Little and Melba Moore, and "Raisin" (1973), a version of Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking "A Raisin in the Sun." "Purlie" and "Raisin" achieved a measure of commercial and critical success, but the show's writers were a mixture of whites and blacks.
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| Baayork Lee, "Golden Boy" original cast member, and Andre de Shields. |
The first completely black mainstream musical of the 1970s came from a time-honored source, THE WIZARD OF OZ. A black producer in New York, Ken Harper, saw the possibilities of reinventing the story in a manner that would access the popularity of Motown, SOUL TRAIN, Afrocentric fashion, and the black urban movies that were developing a greater crossover audience across the country in the early part of the decade. He hired a black composer/lyricist named Charlie Smalls (who, tragically, died soon after the show opened) and got the film company 20th Century Fox to put up the $650,000 investment. "Ease on Down the Road" became the show's infectious theme, as Dorothy and her three friends ventured forth to see "The Wiz," but the musical's tryouts on the real-life road were anything but easy. 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.
Producer Harper bypassed the traditional press campaign to advertise the show and turned directly to the television audience, with a joyous, bubbly commercial aimed -- rather unsubtly -- at getting black seven-year-olds to ask their parents to "ease on down the road" called Broadway. Coupled with word of mouth and the black community's skill at organizing theater parties and group sales, the television commercial turned "The Wiz" into a "wow." It ran 1,672 performances, followed by an immensely successful national tour. There was now a black audience for Broadway shows, an audience that, THE NEW YORK TIMES wrote in 1975, "the white theater establishment has for years been saying did not exist."
It seemed possible now for black and white audiences to revel in the glories of African-American culture from earlier in the century, and a plethora of revues brought the black music of the 1920s and '30s to the Broadway stage for the first time since the music first appeared. "Bubbling Brown Sugar" relived the experience of the Harlem Renaissance in 1976, followed by "Ain't Misbehavin'" in 1978, which was so expert at bringing Fats Waller's music to the public through an amusing, talented cast of five that it won the Tony Award® for Best Musical. Eubie Blake had his moment in the spotlight -- literally, on stage at the age of 94, in "Eubie!" (1979), and Duke Ellington's song catalogue was elegantly staged as "Sophisticated Ladies" in 1981.
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