If you wanted to see a musical on the Great White Way in 1921 — that name came about because of the electric lights on Broadway but was true about the color of the actors and audience — you could see a European-influenced operetta or a splashy Ziegfeld revue.
Miller and Lyles adapted an old script about two grocery store owners running against each other for mayor of a small town. It also contained a romantic subplot, which wasn't played for comedy — revolutionary, at the time. Sissle and Blake mostly recycled old songs from their act and scored two breakout hits: "Love Will Find a Way" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry."
Staged with hand-me-down costumes and sets — the white producers were broke — Shuffle Along tried out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, before it arrived on Broadway, $21,000 in debt. But "Shuffle Along, made money hand over fist," Gaines says. It ran for well over a year, sprouting several touring companies. "White audiences could go see the show and feel like they were slumming it to some extent," Gaines says.
In fact, to appeal to white theater-goers, the chorus girls all had light complexions. "Josephine Baker auditioned for the show several times and was rejected several times," Gaines says. "There are questions about whether it was because of her age, but more likely than not, it was because of the color of her skin. There was a lot of colorism in Shuffle Along in the cast, particularly for the women. They chose all light-skinned women, you know, women that would pass the brown-paper-bag test, which is essentially being lighter than a brown paper bag."
Gaines adds, "I think the colorism isn't something that should really be glossed over, because it really raises questions about how Black people sort of have to navigate through not only all white spaces, but oftentimes all black spaces. And I think, you can look at the work of Tyler Perry, for example, and see that he certainly has had questions raised about his own work in terms of the way colorism plays a part in who are the villains, who are the heroes, who are the love interests, who are the vamps in films that have been produced in the last decade. It really it didn't start in Shuffle Along. I want to make that very clear. But Shuffle Along certainly perpetuated that caste system, which is an unfortunate part of its legacy."
The success of Shuffle Along in 1921 "ended up paving the way for a slew of Broadway shows, in its wake," Gaines says. And white creators, like George Gershwin, started writing jazz-inflected scores. But the musical itself has never been revived successfully — and George C. Wolfe's show about the making of Shuffle Along had a short Broadway run in 2016. It may be a footnote now, as Caseen Gaines writes, but he adds: "If you are a lover of theater and feel like Hamilton or Rent were revolutionary, [or] West Side Story, this is like the godfather of all of those productions."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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