The Scottboro Boys

"The Scottsboro Boys."
Book by David Thompson; lyrics by Fred Ebb; music by John Kander.
Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman.
Vineyard Theatre 108 East 15th Street.
212-353-0303.
Opened March 10, 2010, closes April 18, 2010.

Dorothy Chansky
Minstrel justice? When the Theatre Guild produced John Wexley's play "They Shall Not Die" on Broadway in 1934, critic Burns Mantle called it a "propaganda play," noting that it "suffers from....overstatement" but has an exposition "devoted to an unadulterated and brutalized realism." Some of the same could be said about "The Scottsboro Boys," a new musical with lyrics and music John Kander and Fred Ebb and book by David Thompson, and based on the same gross miscarriage of justice that spawned its dramatic predecessor.

Paulanne Simmons
Having proven that great musicals can be made out of sensational trials ("Chicago") and racist hysteria ("Cabaret"), John Kander and Fred Ebb have gone on to combine both themes in their newest musical. "The Scottsboro Boys" is most definitely Broadway material. But the fact that many people will be disturbed by certain objectionable elements may be a serious obstacle in its future. Let's hope saner minds prevail and its creators curb some of the show's excesses, while critics and audiences accept its premise and allow for certain liberties in the interests of entertainment and a greater truth.

Lucy Komisar
"The Scottsboro Boys" is a stunning, chilling and superbly performed play about racism in the 1930s. Who better to craft a political musical than John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the 1993 classic "Kiss of the Spiderwoman," about the movie fantasies of a prisoner tortured by the Argentine dictatorship that brutalized the country nearly half a century ago. And director-choreographer Susan Stroman stages this in a cutting, jazzy minstrel style that takes irony to new levels.

When the Theatre Guild produced John Wexley's play They Shall Not Die on Broadway in 1934, critic Burns Mantle called it a "propaganda play," noting that it "suffers from . . . overstatement" but has an exposition "devoted to an unadulterated and brutalized realism."

Some of the same could be said about "The Scottsboro Boys," a new musical with lyrics and music John Kander and Fred Ebb and book by David Thompson, and based on the same gross miscarriage of justice that spawned its dramatic predecessor. But while Wexley's métier was shock via realism, Kander, Ebb, and Thompson go for the popular culture jugular. They have constructed a show about racism via the conventions of the most blatant example of racism in the showbiz lexicon: the minstrel show. They are banking on two negatives making a positive.

The actual Scottsboro boys were nine African American teens who hopped a freight train in 1931 and were accused by two white women of rape. It mattered not that the women had been having sex with other men in a hobo camp right before the non-crime, nor that one was a prostitute. And it didn't matter that some of the boys were virgins and one was just twelve years old. In the case some called "The White People of Alabama vs. The Rest of the World," the boys spent between six and nineteen years in jail?the short term for those exonerated in 1937. As one of Thompson's characters puts it, "these here innocent boys are guilty as charged."

Staging the story as a minstrel show is meant to hit audiences where they live, namely taking pleasure in popular entertainment while feeling in-the-know. Songs are tuneful but clever; jokes are corny but predicated on insider knowledge. And recognizing borrowed conventions allows viewers to assign themselves points for sophistication.

It works like this: Eleven talented black song-and-dance men form a pseudo minstrel company and surround their leader, played by the white John McCullum. (Sidebar: there were black minstrel companies beginning in the late nineteenth century; blackface was not a whites-only game.) A silent black woman (Sharon Washington) dressed in proper mid-twentieth century dress, heels, and hat ghosts the proceedings from start to finish. An old-fashioned backdrop with the name of the show falls into place, and the ensemble proceeds to tell its story, alternating short realistic scenes with outrageous comic and musical ones. For instance, in one of the most searing pieces, the youngest boy (Cody Ryan Wise) dreams of the electric chair, and the audience is treated to a macabre dance number featuring one chair, two wired victims in tap shoes, and a horrified child. The most sympathetic character in the quasi-realistic throughline is the brave Haywood Patterson (Brandon Victor Dixon), who is the most blatantly sacrificial lamb of the flock.

Susan Stroman's fantastic and fluid staging moves seamlessly between snazzy dance (she is also the choreographer) and purposeful pictures. Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon, the minstrel end-men, seize their stereotyped roles and run with them. Here, though, the stereotypes are white and include over-the-top small-town southern sheriffs and lawyers, a Jewish defense attorney from New York, and sadistic prison guards. Two of the "boys" (Christian Dante White and Sean Bradford) also double as their female accusers, shifting race and gender at the drop of a vocal and gestural hat. Beowulf Boritt's terrific set design features not only the backdrop, but twelve chairs (the right number for the minstrel company and the right number for a jury) that become a train, a prison, a courtroom, and a bus.

"The Scottsboro Boys"'s pleasures and its problems come from its inevitable ghosting. The fact that we have heard this story before (although I overheard one cast member earnestly telling a well-wisher after the performance that he had never learned about this in school); the easy joys of soft-shoe, a capella harmonizing, and Tin Pan Alley melodies all conspire to induce nostalgia. The single white actor, John Cullum, may still be best-remembered by Broadway audiences for his starring role in the 1975 "Shenandoah." He smoothed over the pain of the Civil War in that role; in this show he re-opens the wounds. Depending on how one looks at it, the "Shenandoah" connection either rubs it in our faces or softens the effect. Whichever it is, the past is always present and it is always framed by the familiar.

The intended effect is finally where the piece as a whole falters. Who could fail to be outraged by the nation's racist past? Who, nowadays, can react with other than stupefied horror at a legal system rivaled perhaps only by its medical analogue in the Tuskegee syphilis project? (This was the 1930s study in which a few hundred black men suffering from syphilis were monitored and observed to see the effects of the disease when left untreated. The men got no medical intervention when penicillin was discovered to cure the infection in the 1940s.) "The Scottsboro Boys" even allows us to demonstrate our liberal bona fides as it presents Samuel Leibowitz, the real-life New York lawyer who got freedom for four of the boys (not nine) and offended southern sensibilities enough that one Alabama Attorney General accused him of rigging things with "Jew money" (the line is in the musical). Ah, yes. Even New Yorkers cannot claim total blamelessness in a Jim Crow past and we get a few seconds to nod to that before moving on.

The end result seems to me that we are let off the hook far too easily. The producers have asked that reviewers not reveal the soupçon of hope offered as a coda, so I won't. But the arguably gratuitous tack-on guarantees that we won't feel too terribly bad about what we've just witnessed, which, after all, is a piece of musical theatre as much as it is a piece of history. While politics as showbiz-as-usual is nothing new, this tale might have hit harder. [Chansky]

"The Scottsboro Boys" is a stunning and chilling musical
about racism in the 1930s.
By Lucy Komisar

"The Scottsboro Boys" is a stunning, chilling and superbly performed play about racism in the 1930s. Who better to craft a political musical than John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the 1993 classic "Kiss of the Spiderwoman," about the movie fantasies of a prisoner tortured by the Argentine dictatorship that brutalized the country nearly half a century ago. And director-choreographer Susan Stroman stages this in a cutting, jazzy minstrel style that takes irony to new levels.

To be able to make such important stories accessible to mainstream theater audiences takes great talent, and Kander and Ebb (who died in 2004) are masters at it. In the context it is odd to want to describe this play as "vibrant" and its numbers as "smashing." This is an important production - though it seems strange to say in the circumstances - a very entertaining one.

It is a fictional play based on real events, the program says. So I thought it important to check out the story against the facts. Here's what I found.

There's no dispute that a fight started between young black and white men who had jumped a freight train headed for Huntsville, Alabama, in 1931. The blacks threw the white youths off the train - or maybe they jumped. The whites contacted authorities about an assault, telling them that two white women remained on board.

At the next stop, the police arrested nine blacks, 12 to 19 years old, for assault and attempted murder for throwing the whites off a moving train. The white women, Ruby Bates, 17, and Victoria Price, in her early early to mid-20s, unemployed millworkers from Huntsville, tried to run away, but were stopped by the stationmaster who asked if they'd been "bothered." Bates said they'd been raped - each by six blacks. Doctors examined them two hours after the alleged attacks and found semen but no signs of violence.

An examining doctor told the judge in private they hadn't been raped, but said he was just out of medical school and couldn't testify for the defense or he would never practice. The judge did not inform the defense. Later, a blacks' lawyer argued that a medical examination of Price showed no living sperm, which would have argued against recent intercourse. A doctor testified to minor scratches and bruises.

Price had been jailed for violating the law on Prohibition and for adultery. During the first trial, the two women - witnesses for the prosecution - were kept in jail, facing possible vagrancy or prostitution charges. Two of the blacks testified that they had seen rapes. Susan Brownmiller, author of "Against Our Will," says the rapes were not proven or disproved.

The left made a cause célèbre of the case. Ruby Blake recanted, and the Communist Party brought her north. She testified that there hadn't been a rape, that Victoria had told her they might stay in jail if they didn't say so. Blake wrote a note to her boyfriend that the blacks hadn't "jazzed" her, the white boys had.

The black men would endure years of trial, convictions thrown out by higher courts, then more jail, a suicide, and years in prison.

In the Kander and Ebb show, given an astonishing and dazzling staging by director Susan Stroman, the story of what happens to the nine black is compressed and artistically portrayed. The jail cell is a collection of piled up metal chairs. The mood is a jazzy operetta. The dramatic vignettes of the story are interspersed with numbers of a minstrel show, which allows you to catch your breath between horrific events and adds the element of satire.

Rodney Hicks (as Clarence Norris), John Cullum (as the Interlocutor), and Brandon Victor Dixon (as Haywood Patterson), photo Carol Rosegg.

Reversing the blackface on white faces of minstrels, Mr. Bones (Colman Domingo) and Mr. Tambo (Forrest McClendon) are black men who play evil white men. Bones is the attorney general. Tambo is a drunk defense lawyer. John Cullen in a white suit is the white interlocutor. The three are memorable in their roles.

Stroman's musical numbers are eloquent. They include a macabre dance around an electric chair. And a revival song sung when the Supreme Court demands a new trial. Price (Christian Dante White) and Bates (Sean Bradford) do a bit called "Alabama Ladies." In "Never Too Late," Ruby Bates (Bradford) tells the truth.

A New Yorker who replaces a local (unqualified) attorney, turns out to be famed defense lawyer Samuel Liebowitz (McClendon again), who had won 77 acquittals and one hung jury in 78 murder trials. Importantly, in this case, he would raise for the first time the exclusion of blacks from juries, which would get a landmark Supreme Court decision. (White men, and no women, as Brownmiller points out, were allowed on juries.)

McClendon as Liebowitz is very Jewish in a New York accent and black and white checked suit - a caricature that the Nazis could have drawn. The satire is sometimes unsettling. Indeed, the Communists had been accused of manipulating the case for propaganda, but Liebowitz was a registered Democrat who would go on to be a judge. Presenting himself and his political commitment, he does an 'Al Jolson' on his knees. The prosecutor's ripping song about "Jew money" gives you the shakes.

The most astonishing - and historically accurate - part of the play is that one of the jailed men, Haywood Patterson (Brandon Victor Dixon), stands up to the accusers and refuses to cop a plea. Dixon is compelling and moving in the role. In fact Patterson, the smartest and most defiant of the group, escaped from prison to Detroit in 1947. He wrote a book, "The Scottsboro Boy." The FBI arrested him, but Michigan Gov. G. Mennen Williams refused extradition to Alabama. He was rearrested in 1950 after a barroom brawl that led to a death, convicted of manslaughter and died of cancer in prison less than two years later. The play's notion that he died in an Alabama prison is wrong.

Why make a point about that? Because the case is too important and too historical to get it wrong, even in a musical.

In February, The Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center opened in Scottsboro, Ala, documenting the trial and its aftermath. [Komisar]

Having proven that great musicals can be made out of sensational trials ("Chicago") and racist hysteria ("Cabaret"), John Kander and Fred Ebb have gone on to combine both themes in their newest musical (posthumous for Ebb) "The Scottsboro Boys."

With a book by David Thompson, the musical tells the story of nine black boys who in 1931 were accused of raping two white women on a freight train bound for Memphis. The case became a cause célèbre as the boys were tried and retried and a New York lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz was brought into the case by the National Labor Defense, an affiliate of the Communist Party.

The Scottsboro boys' story is told as a minstrel show with the stock characters of Mr. Interlocutor, or the middle man (John Cullum) and his two sons, the end men Mr. Tambo (Forrest McClendon) and Mr. Bones (Colman Domingo), creating a comic dialogue between minstrel songs. Although in the original minstrel shows, white men (and sometimes black men) performed in blackface, Cullum, the only white man in the show, never dons black face, and the black men only do so in the end.

The 13-member cast performs as an ensemble, with most of the actors in multiple roles. The only female in the cast is Sharon Washington who plays a mysterious Lady, whose identity is only revealed at the end. The formidable threesome of McClendon, Domingo and McClendon all play principals in the events: McClendon is Deputy Tambo, Lawyer Tambo, Guard Tambo and Leibowitz. Domingo is Sheriff Bones, Lawyer Bones, Guard Bones, the Attorney General and the Clerk. Cullum plays the Judge and Governor of Alabama.

Under Susan Stroman's lithe direction, the ensemble sings and dances its way through the opening "Minstrel March"; "Alabama Ladies," which features Christian Dante White and Sean Bradford in drag as Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, the presumably raped women; "Financial Advice," in which McClendon sings the glories of "Jew money"; and "It's Gonna Take Time," the age-old advice given to African Americans, this time delivered by the Interlocutor.

The numbers are highly reminiscent of both "Cabaret" and "Chicago," but given the time frame of all three shows this is to be expected. And the result is highly satisfying.

But why a minstrel show? Surely the actual trials of the Scottsboro boys took place long after this entertainment had fallen out of favor. But while this is true, the spirit of the minstrel show most definitely lived on. In fact, all those trials did become a national entertainment supplied by black folk, in this case nine innocent boys. "The Scottsboro Boys" makes this clear in a way that is both pleasurable and painful.

Despite the show's many virtues, it does contain some disturbing elements. Leibowitz, who is portrayed as a racist hypocrite and a clown, actually took on the case against the advice of his wife and friends, received no compensation for his work and little reimbursement for his expenses. Southern animosity was so great that five uniformed members of the National Guard were assigned to protect him during the trials.

One could say, however, that the creators of this show spare no one, white or black, guilty or innocent. "The Scottsboro Boys" is a parody of the minstrel show and paints everyone with the same broad strokes of nonsensical, racist humor.

On the other hand Haywood Patterson (the excellent Brandon Victor Dixon), who is portrayed in the musical as a hero who preferred dying in jail rather than confessing to a crime he did not commit, actually died in jail after he escaped, fled to Michigan and was arrested after a barroom brawl that resulted in the death of another man. Patterson claimed self-defense but was charged with murder and after several trials convicted of manslaughter.

There's nothing wrong with adjusting the truth for dramatic reasons. But when writers need to do so, it's best to write a story is based on or inspired by an incident and rename all those involved.

"The Scottsboro Boys" is most definitely Broadway material. But the fact that many people will be disturbed by certain objectionable elements may be a serious obstacle in its future. Let's hope saner minds prevail and its creators curb some of the show's excesses, while critics and audiences accept its premise and allow for certain liberties in the interests of entertainment and a greater truth. [Simmons]

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Three Views of "The Scottsboro Boys"