THEATER
Music Box Theater
Shuffle Along
"In May 1921, the new musical Shuffle Along became the unlikeliest of hits, significantly altering the face of the Broadway musical, as well as that of New York City. By the time Shuffle Along stumbled into town after a back-breaking pre-Broadway tour, it was deeply in debt and set to open at a remote Broadway house on West 63rd Street. But with an infectious jazz score and exuberant dancing, Shuffle Along ignited not just Broadway, but all of New York City. Because of Shuffle Along, Uptown and Downtown met — and became one.
The 2016 Shuffle Along, created anew by a remarkable constellation of artists, brings the original show back to glorious life, while simultaneously telling the heretofore unknown backstage saga of its creation — and how it changed the world it left behind."
Review: ‘Shuffle Along’ Returns to Broadway’s Embrace
So just what is it, this tart and sweet, bubbly and flat, intoxicating and sobering concoction being dispensed from the stage of the Music Box Theater? “Shuffle Along,” which opened with a whoop and a sigh on Thursday night, has been suffering from an identity crisis in the weeks leading up to the announcement of the Tony Award nominations.
It shares its name and most of its song list with a landmark musical from 1921, which means this production should qualify as a revival, right? (That’s what its producers, for strategic purposes involving a juggernaut called “Hamilton,” have argued.)
But wait a minute. The latest version of this show, which features immortal songs by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, has a subtitle, dangling like an heirloom earring: “Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.” So is this “Shuffle Along” old or new?
The answer is emphatically … both, though not in the ways you might expect.
Directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Savion Glover, both of whom collaborated to electric effect on “Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk” two decades ago, “Shuffle Along” is in some ways a variation on one of the mossiest stories from the book of Broadway. You know those beat-the-odds showbiz soaps that regularly surface in gritty black-and-white on the Turner Classic Movies channel?
A plucky, can-do team of underdogs — tired of being told “no” — decide they’re going to put on their show, their way, and by golly if they don’t hit the big time, after the obligatory period of suspenseful hardship. But will the price of success be worth it when fame and fortune start breaking up that old gang of theirs?
That old-as-the-Rialto story line is — bear with me — what’s new in this “Shuffle Along,” the part written by Mr. Wolfe, and it’s what feels stalest. The book of the original “Shuffle Along,” by F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, involved a mayoral campaign in a small town.
The Broadway of the 1920s had no doubt seen similarly plotted shows. What made this one unusual was that its cast and, more startlingly, entire creative team were black. What made it a bona fide hit, running close to 500 performances, was the jaw-dropping virtuosity of its singing and dancing.
Which is also what makes the reincarnated “Shuffle Along” one of the season’s essential tickets. As staged by Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Glover — and interpreted by stars who include Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter and the incomparable Audra McDonald — routines first performed nearly a century ago come across as defiantly fresh.
Of course this show time-travels with plenty of baggage, which Mr. Wolfe unpacks with pedagogical annotations and sentimental mistiness. The determined stars-to-be played by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in the movie “42nd Street” didn’t have to worry about landing a Broadway house because of the color of their skin. When the company of “Shuffle Along” finally sets up camp in New York, it’s 21 blocks north of 42nd Street, in “a theater of no consequence on a street of no consequence.”
That dispirited assessment of the 63rd Street Theater is delivered by the gentlemanly Miller (played by Mr. Mitchell with charmingly stiff propriety), one of the four creators of “Shuffle Along.” The others are Lyles (Mr. Porter), Miller’s loudmouthed vaudeville partner, and the dapper songwriting team of Sissle (Joshua Henry) and Blake (Brandon Victor Dixon).
Then there’s the show’s star, Lottie Gee (Ms. McDonald), a woman of worldly airs and regal carriage, who also happens to be the most talented gal on the Eastern Seaboard. (That means that Ms. McDonald is typecast.) In this telling of the show’s back story, Gee is having an affair with the married Blake, adding the requisite complicating romance in the wings.
Rounding out the top of the bill are two captivating song stylists of different temperaments, both played deliciously by Adrienne Warren, in a breakout performance. Brooks Ashmanskas portrays all the Caucasian men of power who pave — or more often, obstruct — the show’s bumpy road to the Great White Way.
Mr. Ashmanskas doesn’t overdo the music-hall villain aspects of these various incarnations. And toward the end, there’s a truly inspired sequence in which he plays Carl Van Vechten, the highbrow white connoisseur of black culture, who has a rhythmic debate (shades of “Hamilton”) with the “Shuffle Along” team about its place in posterity.
That’s one of the few instances in which Mr. Wolfe translates academic, editorializing self-consciousness into scintillating present-tense theater, a wedding of sensibilities that was more consistently in evidence in “Noise/Funk.” It’s fun watching the standard “I’m Just Wild About Harry” transformed from a staid waltz into a piping-hot showstopper, or hearing a (possibly apocryphal) musical tale of musical theft, perpetrated by one George Gershwin. (Surprisingly, this production makes little of the disturbing theatrical potential of black stars like Miller and Lyles performing in blackface.)
Often you sense that Mr. Wolfe has a checklist of historic points he must, but must, cover before the show’s end. These usually take the form of Wikipedia-style biographical summaries delivered to the audience, or melodramatic declarations that might in other contexts be played for camp. (“History’s calling. The song goes in tonight!”)
The clunky, shoehorned-in exposition doesn’t overwhelm the sweeping grace of “Shuffle Along” whenever it sings or dances. As designed by a top-drawer team that includes Santo Loquasto (set), Ann Roth (costumes), Scott Lehrer (sound), and Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (lighting), the show always looks terrific, evoking in eye-catching shorthand both the riches and privations of its characters’ lives. (Daryl Waters did the excellent orchestrations and arrangements.)
This production also boasts the comeliest and most dynamic chorus on Broadway, which — under Mr. Glover’s guidance — transforms syncopated tap into a widely expressive force of giddy liberation and focused determination, of exaltation and anger, in numbers that include the knockout opener, “Broadway Blues,” and a fierce, competitive dance-off in the second act.
The show’s principals, who also include the piquant Amber Iman, all more or less manage to bend their distinctive charismas into the sinuous contours of early Broadway jazz. But Ms. McDonald is a one-woman time machine de luxe, who translates the precise stylistic quirks of a bygone era into a melting immediacy. She also provides the most fully fleshed character in the show.
She is a rare combination of divinity and discipline, instinct and intelligence. Firsthand accounts suggest that the real Lottie Gee possessed those same traits. One of the implicit tragedies within this show, which trails off into reflective melancholy in its conclusion, is that Gee was never allowed to reach the heights that Ms. McDonald inhabits with such assurance.
We walk northward from our apartment on 32nd and Broadway up Broadway to 45th to where the theater is.
This video is taken on our walk home.
