The show raised concerns back in the 1920s about colorism (chorus girls who were deemed too dark-skinned weren’t cast - a teenage Josephine Baker was rejected several times for that reason) and cultural appropriation (many of the show’s innovations, such as its idiosyncratic dance moves and the double-act repartee of Miller and Lyles, were absorbed and denatured by White showbiz entities). In addition to providing background on Jim Crow and the Great Migration, the author points out that the Tulsa Race Massacre occurred a week after “Shuffle Along” opened in 1921. Gaines places the show within the broader American political and racial culture, making the book not only resonant but relevant.
Was racism the cause, or was it the dizzying shifts in popular taste of the period, especially sensitive among material written for and by Black entertainers? Or was it, perhaps, that “Shuffle Along” was less than the sum of its many compelling parts? On this crucial question, Gaines hedges his bets, but he provides a telling quote from the Baltimore Afro-American from 1933, which details the high caliber of contemporary Black entertainers: “These advances of Negro artists mark milestones on the road of progress for the theater, but they all combine to make ‘Shuffle Along of 1933’ just another colored show.” Over the next four decades, as Gaines chronicles in each disheartening iteration, “Shuffle Along” would be reduced, revised and revived countless times without success at one point, the two respective teams - Sissle and Blake, Miller and Lyles - would perform in competing versions of shows derived from the same exhausted material. To make matters worse, the show was thousands of dollars in the red before the opening night curtain went up in May 1921.īut the show’s creators were unable to draw down creative lightning and make it strike twice in their careers. When the show shuffled its way into New York after some desperate tryouts, it was kept at arm’s length from Broadway’s crown jewels, opening at the 63rd Street Theatre, near Columbus Circle. A few musical numbers were written just to suit some extra costumes that came the producer’s way at bargain prices.
#The act musical walking papers full#
The four men cobbled together a show called “Shuffle Along,” which evolved from a thin scenario about the comic complications of a three-way mayoral race into a full narrative, with songs that artfully juxtaposed the threadbare minstrelsy traditions of the 19th century with the debonair jazz stylings that presaged the Harlem Renaissance. James Hubert “Eubie” Blake had graduated from playing the piano in Baltimore brothels to form an elegant vaudeville act with vocalist and World War I veteran Noble Sissle. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles - former students at Fisk University - had been playing the Black vaudeville circuit as blackface comedians.
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