"The Scottsboro Boys' on Broadway (1st review)

My father was no racist. Far from it. He objected when his contemporaries referred to black people as schvartzes, and he'd never use the n word. Still, he participated in a minstrel show that was performed annually at his synagogue in Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s.

There the men didn't put on blackface, as was the minstrel custom, but they did use Southern accents, act stupid, tell corny jokes and sing sentimental songs. No one insulted black people overtly, but the entire exercise conveyed a subconscious condescension that the performers themselves failed to recognize. (Blacks themselves fell into this trap in those days. Hattie McDaniel accepted her Academy Award in 1940 by saying she hoped she'd always "be a credit to my race.") When a new, young rabbi came to the congregation in 1960 and told the men's club they could no longer present such shows, my father's friends were shocked. They never realized what they were doing was insensitive.

My father and his men's club buddies were hardly alone in their day. Minstrel shows were a popular device among white entertainers not because they were racists but because the minstrel format was highly entertaining, with its rapid-fire succession of jokes, skits and songs— the essential elements of American theater. Judy Garland wore blackface and an Aunt Jemima wig in the film Everybody Sing (1938). Garland and Mickey Rooney performed blackface routines in Babes in Arms (1939) and Babes On Broadway (1941). Fred Astaire sang in blackface to commemorate Lincoln's birthday in the movie Holiday Inn in 1942; Irving Berlin's lyric for that scene includes this praise for Lincoln: "He freed de darkies."

Falsely accused

I thought of the synagogue's minstrel show when I attended the Broadway premiere of The Scottsboro Boys, a musical that tells a disturbing story of racism through the device of a minstrel show. It illuminates a racially charged subject by using this same racially charged (and also very entertaining) form.

Scottsboro's nine black performers tell (and re-enact) the outrageous tale of black teenagers in Alabama who in 1931 were convicted of raping two white women while they were hobos on a freight train. Local authorities begged lynch mobs to "let us give them a trial and then we'll electrocute them." One of the women later confessed that their accusation was false; no sexual contact had ever occurred, but the boys were kept in jail for years.

Their case was appealed by a Jewish lawyer from New York who was vilified, and whose life was threatened, because of his background. The miscarriage of justice became an international cause; the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was transformed when she, as a young woman, attended a rally for the Scottsboro Boys.

This perversion of justice is told with catchy songs and dances by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. It's a provocative and powerful show whose serious story is told so entertainingly that it never seems to be sending a message— a crowning artistic achievement by the team that gave us Cabaret, Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Kander, Ebb and scriptwriter David Thompson are known for dramatizing stories of underdogs struggling to survive. Before seeing the show, I expected Scottsboro would resemble Chicago, which also concerned miscarriages of justice in roughly the same time period. But The Scottsboro Boys is much more hard-hitting while its music is no less catchy "“ including a grotesque tap-dance number titled "Electric Chair." The songs use vamps and cakewalk rhythms to express suppressed rage.

Back of the bus

The estimable John Cullum, the only white member of the cast, plays the Interlocutor in the minstrel show— the man who functioned as emcee and straight man in such entertainments. (He also plays the judge as well as the governor of Alabama.) In minstrel shows a signature line for all Interlocutors was, "Gentlemen, be seated," and this phrase reaches poignancy in the show's penultimate scene when the "boys" start taking off their black-face makeup, preparing to get the hell out of where they've been, while Cullum pleads with them, please, to once again be seated. The scene dissolves to a bus where Cullum, the driver, orders his black female passenger (Rosa Parks in 1955, we may surmise) to go to the back of the bus and sit down.

Cullum is 80 years old and grew up in Tennessee. As a teenager, he tells me, he put black grease on his face and impersonated the black song-and-dance man, Bert Williams. Like my father, Cullum innocently felt he was paying tribute to an entertainer whom he admired.

Jews, too

The Scottsboro Boys is being picketed by people who object to the minstrel format. Actually, the show makes a valid point, illustrating the attitude of those times that black people (and New York Jews) were legitimate objects of ridicule.

Al Jolson became a blackface star in the minstrel format by portraying African-American underdogs who outsmarted enemies while he exchanged wisecracks with the audience. Many of his songs included stereotypical Negro dialect, such as "Your boy am waitin'," but Jolson sang the words with affection. Jolson hid behind a mask to make a sympathetic point.

Jews (like Jolson) and blacks shared a history of suffering at the hands of oppressors, and Jewish singers and songwriters were particularly attracted to the black experience. As the writer Lewis A. Erenberg put it, this "kept them in touch with their past, though with the pain once removed." A black cast member in Scottsboro, incidentally, adopts a stereotypical Northern white accent to impersonate the boys' Northern lawyer, perceptively suggesting that blacks and Jews are in the same boat.♦


To read another review by Toby Zinman, click here.