Interviewer: Where do you think the Broadway musical came from?
George C. Wolfe: I think the Broadway musical came from a number of sources. I think it came, I think on a question, it came from the minstrel show. I think, I, I I think he came from sort of this, just, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, the, the most vulgar populist entertainment forms that were going around when this country was sort of searching for an identity. And, and, and so I, you know, I. And I choose to find a lot of the rhythms in minstrel show structures because I’m very fascinated by that structure. And I’m also fascinated by. Combustible racial-sexual politics that was underneath a buoyant art form. So that’s just very, very fascinating to me because I think… All the aspects of American culture that have sort of captured the world come from a very, very complicated place. Even if the end product seems to be one of joy and optimism and the human spirit soaring, their birth started in dark, really peculiar, really interesting places.
Interviewer: Informed people that say, the minstrel show, that’s not your story, well, what does the, what does minstrels have to do with it?
George C. Wolfe: That’s not whose story, my story?
Interviewer: No, the story of the traditional Broadway musical. Help me and them to understand just how integral the minstrel show is to the traditional musical.
George C. Wolfe: I mean, I think the Mr. Show gave birth to vaudeville, which gave birth to legitimate theater, I mean in this country, because as much as there was Shakespeare that was touring around, but America was not ultimately, unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case now, but I think America wasn’t ultimately interested in impersonating anything back then. America had to take other forms and sort of reinvent them and use it to… Serve its agenda and its vision of itself. And so it came up with this structure called the Mistral Show that I think was sort of a way, this sort of convoluted way of processing while maintaining the hierarchical structures of black and white, but at the same time culturally mixing them up. So, which is really, which this country seems to do a lot of, that somehow I want to maintain my power position, but at the same time I want to go in and explore this other thing that’s going on. You know, you have it in the 20s when slumming in Harlem was a thing. I want it to maintain during the day my hierarchical position, but I want go up here at night and play and discover these other kind of really complicated rhythms that are really reflective of sort of the peculiar American animal that I am. And so I think that’s what’s fascinating to me about just the minstrel show in structure, that you had it trafficking in prototypes, you know, the same way still to this day in our most popular art form, which is TV right now, is still trafficking in these prototypes. Some would call them stereotypes. I think to be a little bit more generous, I’ll call them, I won’t call them that, in which everybody sort of knows the joke before the joke happens, because we know the type. You know, there are sweet ballads that happen, there are bawdy numbers that happen. There’s play on language. There’s all these sorts of things. And then if you look at the early forms of the American musical, that’s exactly what was going on as well. They, you know, and then somebody added a cohesive structure. And then one point somebody said, well, everything should contribute to the storytelling. But ultimately it really came forth from all those types and ultimately be If you look at a lot of musicals, you can trace the origins of certain types and certain prototypes, you know, that are still around in popular culture, back to the minstrel show. You know, there was a lot of cross-dressing that went on. There was, you now, the absurdity. I mean, it’s just, I think it’s just the identity was always colliding against. So I think the minster show becomes very fascinating because it becomes the hotbed of a lot of stuff, not just popular entertainment. Identity and performance and all these other worlds that I think we’re still addressing in some peculiar way. And somehow music has always afforded. There was a conversation which I heard once in which it said that the American idea of the melting pot really only lives in the music. Every other arena there’s all this tension, but somehow it has been able to, the collision of different rhythms and energies and the forces that make up this country are alive in the popular music and they’ve always been alive in popular music. Somehow. The democracy of the popular music has allowed this convergence of sounds and rhythms to take place. And that convergence of those energies and rhythms is what really sparked the dynamic which gave birth to the American musical. You know, with people reaching, reaching, taking a melodic structure from their culture and reaching into another culture and taking a rhythmic structure here. And they reach into another cultural culture and taking maybe a form here. That’s what’s really exciting about this country, and all of that, and it happens in various other ways, but I think it’s happened in its healthiest and its fullest way in musical expression, in American musical expression.
Interviewer: What do you think the musical says about us?
George C. Wolfe: I think it varies. I think ultimately in some very peculiar way, it reflects the era. It reflects the machinery. It reflects where we are. I view things in very sort of strange ways. I think we’ve just gone through a period of the big, bland, machine-like, British-informed musical where it really wasn’t about dynamic personalities. The parts were interchangeable. The emotions were canned. There was not a lot of, from my vantage point, a lot a spontaneity going on. They were well-oiled machineries. And I think sort of that. That’s reflective of the Reagan era to me in some extraordinary respect. I think that the musicals of the 50s seemed to, you know, revolve heavily around really dynamic personalities. You know, 60s, it was searching for some kind of new form because the country was searching for some new kind of form. So I think always if you study, you now, not high art, and not necessarily low art, but that middle brow art form, whichever going on in any era, you can really find, I think, the secrets and the rhythms of what’s going on in the country or with a people. And so, when you look at the shifts, I think it’s very reflective of that.
Interviewer: Thinking back to that immigrant melting pot culture, I saw something that you said about where art comes from and coming from, not from joy and not from pain, but tell me how you see the art of Broadway related to the immigrant experience that way.
George C. Wolfe: I don’t understand that question. Say that one more time.
Interviewer: You said art comes from figuring out how to survive. It just struck me that’s what immigrants come to the country. That’s what they do. And I sort of wanted to…
George C. Wolfe: Well, I think it has less to do with specifically, I mean, it has, of course, one could say it’s immigrant. I think that it has something very specifically to do with finding yourself in a new landscape and new rules. You know, and I think that because this country is perpetually sort of reinventing itself, each generation seems to keep finding itself in a landscape. So I don’t think it’s just specifically the immigrant experience where… Where you’re figuring out how to survive. I mean, I think every generation, as the rules change, as the toys change, as the machinery changes, as the dominant form of communication changes, from radio to television, et cetera, that artists are perpetually, and also more than artists specifically, the human spirit is figuring out how to locate its heart, how to locate its ability to survive. Regardless of what rhythm is coming at it, and I think that the people who are part of the society, who are artists, then find a means of releasing that struggle, or releasing that confused state, or releasing, I don’t know if I can struggle, and that’s where the art springs forth from. I think, once again, I think it’s most often and easily expressed in music, I think is also sometimes in literature. Occasionally, I find it in a musical, but I think. For the longest time, I think for the longest time, musicals were set aside as being the place where you went to escape those questions. You know, let’s go to some place where we don’t have to ask those questions, where we know where we are, where we can have our values affirmed, and then at one point, fortunately, you know, people turn the corner and start going, no, why don’t we use this incredibly populist art form that everybody trusts? In some strange way because the minute that overture begins and the overture goes boom, boom, boom, an artist is instantly surrendered. So it’s sort of the perfect place to, I think, to go down peculiar little dark alleys and corners and begin to actively explore how is that, how that little, that little will I make it moment, you know, lives inside of all of us. It’s an incredibly theatrical moment and it’s a very crucial moment to the human spirit. So putting that in a musical setting, I think is a very exciting possibility. If you really look at the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, which are brilliantly, beautifully crafted, there’s this American optimism going on, but there’s also these impulses of controlling the masses. I mean, I don’t want to get into the fascist impulses inside of Rodgers& Hammerstein, because I don’t completely believe that, but The King and I is an infinitely fascinating musical to me, simply because. It really is about how to colonize a people. And honestly, it’s a wonderful romantic story, but it’s really about colonizing people. This woman comes in, she tries to fake this king. She really doesn’t, but she trains his children so that by the time he dies, somebody who she has trained has taken over. And I just, one day I was watching and I went, oh my God, that’s what’s going on. And I love that musical, but I was going, oh my god, she just completely, totally violated an entire culture. All the while singing songs like Getting To Know You. And it was just so, anyway, that was a little sidebar. I’m sure it won’t end up in there. But it was, you never know. But it’s just, I think it was… Is we’re doing swell and we’re holding it together and we are great and it was affirming this sort of like. Optimism and I think very specifically a white American optimism and and and occasionally a show would come along you know you know pal joey I think is really very fascinating um even though I think structurally I’m not sure if it works but it’s really fascinating because it’s it’s getting inside of another dynamic of human behavior um I academically understand the phenomenon, but I don’t. Emotionally understand it because I, you know, I’ve talked to so many people who said it was like a breath of fresh air, it was just startling. So I intellectually understand it, but I don’t, you, I don’t respond as emotionally as I do to some other pieces where I go, oh, this is very fascinating. You know, I find Finian’s Rainbow, even though I think the piece creaks like a very, very old wagon that should not be driven anymore. But just in terms of the wit. And the social satire that lives in the lyrics more so than in the book. I think it’s just extraordinary. So I think there are, individuals will come along and they would sort of nest with it and, my big theory about musicals is that, which is my big theory about almost all of American popular entertainment, that on stage, there’s this… Incredibly bright, buoyant world, and offstage is the real dark world, getting ready to grab it and take control of it, which is why it’s singing so hard and dancing so hard and trying to be so happy all the time. And I just like those moments when some of that darkness starts to creep onstage and gets into a little war or gets into little squirmish with the buoyancy. That I really, really, real love. And those are the kind of shows I like. Those are the kinds of shows that I like to create. And the kind of shows I like to be a part of and certain artists at any given time have moved it to the point where they’re equal parts dark as well as buoyancy so they’re on stage. That’s really fascinating to me and so those musicals along the way that have danced with that dynamic are the ones that I personally find appealing and the ones when I was studying musicals, the ones that I responded to.
Interviewer: Great majority. The great majority of shows just focus on that joy of the world, don’t they?
George C. Wolfe: Yeah, well, but, you know, yeah. And I think that’s fine, and I think that’s really great, and it’s really wonderful, or romance, you now, and, you, know, and I, and think that fine, but you know it’s, that’s not the aspect of musical theater that excites me, or fascinated me, or intrigued me, or made me want to be a part of that world. It was, it was, it was. Finding what was existing beyond the known confines of what the world was, you know, is there something beyond this ocean, is there’s something beyond that? Because I think that a musical must maintain its buoyancy, and I’m just always fascinated how much you can mix in there and still maintain the buoyancy. And I’m fascinated by when that boundary gets pushed, because it’s a dangerous act.
Interviewer: Were there musicals when you were growing up that struck you as like this is why I want to be working in this area?
George C. Wolfe: No, I was just fascinated in theater from the very beginning. When I was 13, I came to New York and I saw a revival of West Side Story and a bunch of other stuff, because I’d known the movie, but I hadn’t really seen it. And then, and I realized this probably, I mean, of course I realized probably like 15-some years later that the quintet that happens just before the rumble. It freed up a section of my brain that wanted to move in a certain direction, and when I saw that fundamentally an empty stage and five different groupings of people on stage and they were in completely different locales and light was crafting there, I think it freed my brain, my creative brain, to think a certain way. And I think seeing that moment more than the politics of what’s going on or the social reality that was being explored in the piece or any of that just just the the simplicity and the brilliance of that simplicity of the staging gave my brain permission to re-imagine my own version, I guess, of musical theater.
Interviewer: What do you think was Jerry Robin as genius that way?
George C. Wolfe: Um. I would, the thing which is, which I get, you know, the things which I value most in theater is. The ability to combine intelligence and theatricality. To storytelling, you know, that something could be highly theatrical, highly entertaining and unbelievably smart at the exact same time, smart in the way that they told the story, smart in they way they invited an audience into the process, you now, and that’s… In all the shows that, you know, in the shows that I think are just Fiddler, Gypsy, West Side, of course. You know, that there’s just, it’s just sublime intelligence and sublime theatricality. And a lot of times, things that are really smart are really not theatrical, and a lot times things that are incredibly theatrical are not smart at all. And it’s the… The blending of those two that I think is a phenomenon.
Interviewer: Coming back to when you were younger and you thought about Broadway as the place and what it symbolized. You were a little kid. What did you think of Broadway? What did it mean to you?
George C. Wolfe: Well, it had less to do with Broadway, it had more so to do it New York. It was New York where the place where you went away to and you did theater and you were an artist and you struggled and, you know, it was the whole mythology of that. That’s what was fascinating to me. And I was sort of born wanting to do theater, which is sort of, cause I’m from Kentucky and it’s not like the great cultural center of the universe, but I was always completely and totally fascinated with theater. In. And were from TV and somewhat from movies, but more so from TV, it was the, you know, that was where you went if you wanted to do theater. So it was just sort of the mythology of New York was more important to me than specifically Broadway. Because as far as I was concerned, everybody in the city was struggling to be an actor or an artist or a composer or something else. New York was filled with nothing but people wanting to be in the theater.
Interviewer: Speaking of like myths, what do you think is the myth of Broadway?
George C. Wolfe: What is the myth of Broadway? Oh, I think there are 8 million myths on Broadway. I think that… Hmm, what is the biggest myth on Broadway? That it’s available to everybody. It’s still, unfortunately to this day, I think a very tiny club, and it’s a tiny club at a time where we really can’t afford to be one because it is in desperate need of new energy. And it’s not to say that it’s not available to new energy, it’s just the rigor of what it takes to get in the room because of the economics, because of. It’s history and it’s tradition of being a club. I think it’s very, you know, it’s maybe once by the time it felt it was more available, maybe when the economics were not as severe as they are, it was available. But I think, you now, it takes very severe circumstances and a ferociousness to work in the landscape. And maybe it always did. I don’t know. It just seems. It’s next to impossible these days. And also there’s been this invasion, recent invasion, of corporate thought, which I think is the antithesis of the creative process. And hopefully it’s a trend that is on its way out or that will have a finite impact because I think it’s just deadly. You know, it’s like TV on Broadway. We think, we think, we think. Now that’s a justice show based on what the biggest and the loudest number of we’s think. And that’s just not art. I mean, that’s one thing which is wonderful, particularly about being a writer or a director or even an artist on Broadway is that what you say, what you do in the moment matters. And if there is gonna be this corporate thought process that is dictating the artistic process, why work in it? Because you can make so much more money, you know. In those other art forms where that is the way of life.
Interviewer: Just coming back to this myth, what about the equal opportunity idea that if you’ve got talent, you can make it on Broadway? Do you think that’s a myth, or was that a unique thing?
George C. Wolfe: I think with actors, I think that’s true. I think, once again, I just… I think if you do have talent that I think you can make it there. I think it becomes a very… I think it’s just luck. It’s also knowing, I mean it really is knowing the right people. I mean, it’s, you know, I guess I’m in the club, but I guess I am. I mean I work regularly there and I can get shows done, so I should assume so. And I don’t mean to feel like, uh, uh. But it’s sort of like… At any given time, there’s such a finite number of people in that club that I just don’t find it very, very healthy. And I’m not really sort of flattered by being one of a few in the club because the more people there is, the more dynamic. I mean, the Broadway’s going through a very good period now because there are lots of projects. A lot of those projects come from other places, i.e. London, and the import business is not particularly fascinating, that fascinating to me for culture. I mean, it’s nice to exchange things. But a really huge staple of the work that is done on Broadway now currently comes from England. And I don’t know, I just don’t, I wish that there was more energy that was invested in, you know, in taking shows to Broadway, but then the economics is so severe. I mean, I sort of understand it all and having worked, you now, as a book writer, as a director and as a producer in the landscape, I understand the severity of the landscape and the economic realities, but there’s still this sort of like… I guess sort of childlike, buoyant, optimistic person who goes, wouldn’t it be great if there was a really peculiar, interesting, dark little musical in one theater and then a revival of some old chestnut in the next set and then of a fabulous new musical by new artists going on and then maybe one little British thing in here. But you know what I mean? Why can’t it all be there? And I think that that’s sort of my fantasy Broadway. And also, I say that any time I go there, I guess with the exception of, or any time I’ve worked in that landscape, with the exception of On the Town, even though On the Town hasn’t been done in a very long time, I always try to bring something that I think wouldn’t be there otherwise. Not because I’m doing it, but just to bring another kind of energy, you know, whether it is, whether it’s jellies, or whether it bring in the noise, or Ageless in America, another kind of energy and another dynamic into the landscape, because there’s enough of. It belongs here, so I feel certain responsibilities to bring to the landscape things that people don’t think should be there. That belong somewhere else.
Interviewer: Tell me about, you know, looking back historically, you know the harbor, skershwims, Hammerstein’s, they’re all Jewish. What do you think, what was it about those immigrant Jewish people and the Broadway musical? What was the connection then?
George C. Wolfe: Oh, God, I don’t know if I can speak with any level of authority about that. I mean, you know…
Interviewer: Well, there’s also that interesting connection in terms of those were also the blackface performance.
George C. Wolfe: Yeah, I mean, there’s all sorts of, I just saw the jazz singer and I had never seen it. I just thought recently because of another project that I was working on, I went, oh, this is just too complicated. This is too culturally and racially too complicated, I don’t even know how to begin to examine it or dissect it really. And the thing which is true about, you know, about Gershwin, about… A lot of the composer that you meant, is that it was unquestionably jazz in form. Except for Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was very much so jazz-informed. And I think that… The 20s, just the 20s culturally is such an extraordinarily fascinating era to me because I think there was such extraordinary cross-fertilization that was going on. Anne Douglas talks about this book in her book, Terrible Honesty, in which she, which I think is just an extraordinary book about examining Manhattan, examining culture, and examining those black and Jewish, you know, meeting places and collision places. And I think what’s really fascinating is… Is jazz as a music has some component to it. I’m halfway clear, I’m not clear, because I’m sort of in the middle of a show that’s its own unique thing, but jazz gives permission much the same way the blues does, but even jazz even more so that emotions can go from here to here in the course of one song. And I think it sort of accesses, you know, certain emotional ambiguities and dichotomies in an exciting way. So it makes it, and it also does so while maintaining an energy source and a vitality. So that. The invention or the creation of jazz by black artists sort of gave this country a language that it was searching for and gave it a rhythmic identity, if you will, that was perfect for what this country was. And so, it makes perfect sense that… That the composers who were working and who had easy access to the Broadway stage would use this invented language and rhythm for the theater because it was sort of perfect because it was celebrating and exploring a dynamic that they were interested in celebrating and explore. So you know what I’m saying? So I think it was some peculiar kind of marriage. And because there were very, very few, there were a number, you know, of black composers who… Were working on Broadway, oddly enough. Now, back in the 20s, much more so than now, much more still in the twenties than you even have in the nineties, that it’s sort of, I don’t view it so much as some sort of strange peculiarity. Once again, it probably is a similar effect of the immigrant experience. I don’t even think, I think you just had these brilliant composers and this incredibly brilliant art form that said more that captured more of the American spirit than any other art form that you know musical statement that that was that was available at the day so it would seem to me like a logical marriage I mean I think there is something very interesting and complicated about uh black American culture and and Jewish American culture and where they meet and where the complement each other and where they bounce off of one another and where they. Collide with one another. I mean, I think that’s extraordinarily fascinating. Conversation and that so many of the really popular black face performers of the day were Jewish. It’s all really, really, fascinating to me. Something worthy of a musical itself truly is.
Interviewer: What about Shuffle Along? That seems to have been a seminal show. How do you see that? I think Langston Hughes said it started the whole vogue for Negro vogue.
George C. Wolfe: Well, I mean, I think it was it was. It was like, once again, going back to what I was saying a little bit earlier, you know, this new era, these new artists, these white artists were searching for a language. And I think that they were searching very specifically for an American language because finally, I mean, I think a really peculiar thing has happened with American culture because I think, finally, by the time we got to the 20s… There was a generation that had come along following World War I that was not interested in being bound to where they were from or where their ancestors were from. They were interested in forging their new identity. And so I think for a period of the 20s and for a bit of time of the 30s, everybody was searching for that American language. And jazz sort of led the way. The fortunate and unfortunate thing is that with the rise the fascism. In Europe in the 30s and the 40s, a lot of brilliant European artists fortunately had a place to flee to, and so they fled to the United States, further re-establishing a European stronghold on American culture, which I think suffocated or stopped this blossoming of the search for American language and culture. And I think it took really sort of you know, late 50s, 60s, 70s before that search began again. So it’s really just interesting just to see how those rhythmic shifts have happened. And so therefore, with a piece like Shuffle Along, which was more review-like in structure than anything else, once again, going back to the minstrel show structure, it just showed, you know New York was able to see. A culture performing its songs and its dance created by people who knew the culture. So there was no sifter that you had to go through. There was no Sifter as in the minstrel show, which was black performers performing white people’s vision of black people with Shuffle Along and with those black musicals there was still unquestionably a certain amount of minstrels still going on. But because it was created by black artists and put together by black artist and performed by black artis, you didn’t see the sifter. You saw the real juice. You saw real spark. And I think that it must have been just an exhilarating thing, just as much the same way I’ve seen Josephine Baker and the Revue Negro in Paris.
Interviewer: You know, starting in the teens before, there’s this appropriation. Maybe that’s a word you need, maybe not, but you know, the castle’s gilded gray with the shimmy. Tell me your feelings about it and describe for people who have no idea that it happened at all what it was.
George C. Wolfe: Well, I mean, it’s like in the 20s, everybody had permission to visit each other’s lands and see what they were doing. And some people visited those lands and acknowledged it the source, and other people visited those lands, and stole and said, look what I came up with. Paul Whiteman wrote a history of jazz in which there was not one black person included in the book. I mean it’s just that kind of. That kind of stuff, and he had this famous concert at Carnegie Hall, which made a lady out of jazz. I mean, you know, so you have all this incredibly peculiar, peculiar sort of like lifting and stealing of culture, which continues on to the day. And then you had other people who went, oh, there’s an energy source, let me go over and explore that. And then, you have performers like Ethel Waters, who was incorporating in terms of her singing style. Not only sort of the jazz and blues inflections that was a part of African-American culture, but also because she was a huge crossover artist, she was bringing sort of, for lack of better words, more high-tone sort of singing style to her work so that therefore there was this mixing and matching and being informed by everybody that was happening in the 20s. I think the castles would receive. Private dance lessons from black people and then go on and present it. I’m not a real expert about the castles, but I know one or two stories about them saying, look what we did, but also they would take the curves out of it and the crotch out of, out of and then transform it into something that was easily accessible. But the fact that the matter is. White audiences, particularly white sophisticated urban audiences, were interested in the real thing. You know, with Carl Van Vechten and him having his parties in which, you know, the brilliance of white downtown and the brilliants of black uptown would meet and gather and hang out. And so that therefore there was extraordinary cross-fertilization. Langston Hughes has this extraordinary line, I’m going to paraphrase it, but the 30s came the depression, and with that the depression and the white people discovered Noel Coward moved back downtown. And it’s sort of, but there was this period in which, you know, everybody was sleeping across borders and boundaries with complicated results, sometimes extraordinarily positive, sometimes very peculiar realities going on, but at least there was this incredible cross-fertilization, cultural appropriation, if you will, you know. Which I think is 80 times more interesting than what I would call cultural strip mining. In which you go in and access a culture and then you strip it of all its juices, integrity and its vividness and you present sort of a watered down form. I think we’ve, that Broadway later fell into that in terms of black culture doing a lot of that sort of stuff with a lot with those reviews. But there was this extraordinary period, but this was true of the 20s all over, there was these cultural renaissance in Paris, in Berlin, I mean, it’s just. I think it was just an extraordinary time, I guess, you know, and bringing the noise, this is sort of celebrated. It’s, you, know, enjoy yourselves because it ain’t gonna last. It was sort of the last great party before fascism rose all over the planet. And I think somehow this, I think sometimes the human spirit just knows it, just knows we need to have this party last as long as we possibly can. You know, because it really is just, it’s very fascinating because, you know, with the fascism in Europe, I was also fascism in this country with the plan on the rise. All that started to happen in the, you know, the seeds that were planted in the 20s while everybody else was getting to know each other’s culture and then what the 30s is like came to the foreground and began to dominate, you know try to control and suppress, you know, everybody.
Interviewer: I want to go back to Shuffle Along for one second. Ubi Blake, I learned, starred at his first professional job was in a brothel. What’s the connection there in terms of where he’s coming from and what he brings to Broadway?
George C. Wolfe: What do you mean, I don’t understand the question. From brothel to Broadway? Is there a connection? Simon, I’m having to be a work on Broadway. They’re really whores. No. No, I mean, that’s the phenomenon. I mean if you want to get into the history of sort of jazz and it’s moved from the south to the north, I mean there was the Storyville section of New Orleans, where a lot of the… Jazz musicians of the jazz piano players of the day were employed because in all the whorehouses that were scattered all around Storyville, they would have a jazz pianist in those places. And then just after the Spanish-American War, I think it was the Spanish American War, some sailor got killed in some big fight in Storyville because Storyville up to that point was legalized. It was a legal area of prostitution. And when the sailor got killed, there’d been an ongoing battle. They closed it down. So that all these musicians who had been employed in New Orleans for the longest time, their huge source of income was gone. So, and by that time, also because of the factory work that was available to blacks in Chicago, a lot of musicians just moved north thinking that there would be because there was this, people were writing home and talking about, you know, all the possibilities that were available. All these jazz musicians that had been concentrated very heavily, not exclusively, but very heavily in New Orleans. Took the train up to Chicago. And so that started a certain kind of music migration. And then with the dynamics that were happening in New York City with most of the black people living in sort of like a Hell’s Kitchen area, and they were perpetually being beaten up on by a lot of the gangs, I think primarily the Irish gangs. There was a building boom that took place in Harlem that was anticipating a subway line that was gonna continue up there. The subway line was late. In being developed, so they overbuilt too soon, so they had all these available apartments. So the black people in the Hell’s Kitchen areas, in order to escape being attacked on a regular basis, pooled their monies in the church and went up there and started moving to Harlem. And then as word passed around within the black communities of the south, that all of a sudden there was this place, there was a tract of land that was ours, quote unquote, then it started to attract the artists and various other people. So, you know, so it’s. So it’s hard to separate sort of these migratory, you know, principles from the history that was informing those changes. So the fact that, that Eubie Blake was working at a brothel had more so to do with that’s where a job was. That’s where he could be paid as a, as a performer. You know, so I think that’s, that’s more so, but, but clearly, I mean, you, know, it’s sort of like Fosse dancing, you now, in strip clubs that, you know. And that, at one point, informed his art, but clearly he was dancing there because he wanted to show this experience, and later he was able to do the kind of, I guess, work that he wanted it to do. So I’m not sure how much there is a direct brothel to Broadway link that there is, although it’s a snazzy title. But I don’t know, I don’t know.
Interviewer: Oh, thanks. What about the Charleston? Where’d the Charlestons go?
George C. Wolfe: In theory, the Charleston, I don’t know, some dance historian could speak better to this, but in theory, the Charleston is a very, very, very old African dance that, and not even an African-American dance, it is a, very very, very, very old dance. And then it had been around, I think for a very long time, like, you know, turn of the century had been around, but it reached a certain vogue in the 20s and became the dance craze of the world. And, And the thing which is also what’s really what’s also just, this is not so much particularly about Broadway, but I think the phenomenon of World War I I think is so crucial to the certain jazz craze that took place because with World War One, there were jazz bands that were formed that were part of the armed forces. So that therefore when they went to Europe, it was the first time that a lot of Europeans were hearing jazz. Jazz one, but also jazz two played by black musicians. So that the World War I allowed one, allowed for these musicians to be employed, but also allowed for them by traveling around Europe, you know, fighting, also allowed them to spread the music that was going to dominate, you know. The century. So that’s also just a very sort of cultural fascinating thing to me.
Interviewer: I think Ubi Blake and Noble Cissell travel.
George C. Wolfe: Exactly, James Reese Europe, yeah, with James Reese, I think was the…
Interviewer: And I think he in particular sort of had an elevated, you know, he wasn’t the low, you now, dark side that he was, he wanted to showcase it as a proper sort of art.
George C. Wolfe: But I think that’s true of almost everyone who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was writing quote-unquote blues poetry, but he saw the art in the blues, not just the feeling in it, but how the art and the feeling collided with one another.
Interviewer: After World War II, Langston Hughes tries to do street scene with Kurt Weill and comes away saying, you know, if we want to do, if we wanna have our own clear saying, we can’t work at Broadway. Tell me about that. We think he was frustrated by Broadway’s
George C. Wolfe: Well, I think you have to. I think because ultimately, I think it is historically proven very difficult to do, not even serious, but substantive subject matter about people of color in the musical theater. It’s a very peculiar thing because of those forms that have soared, that have run. For many years have been very successful, have been review-like in structure.
