...Allen Woll Woll , Allen . Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls . Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 1989 . Copyright © 1990 by Duke University Press 1990 loolrleviews JJT and saxed, beat the bop in club cellars, syncopated odd phrases, and dropped...

...Langston Hughes Copyright © 1993 by Duke University Press 1993 Church, Theatre, and Gospel Songs Langston Hughes Walking down 135th Street in New York I saw two large placards, both in the same shop window, announcing church-theatrical entertainments. One placard read that one of Harlem's...

... Ellington's classic tone parallel to the Negro people, which he employed as the foundation for his social significance revue, "My People," presented in 1963 at the Arie Crown Theatre at :\1cCormick Place in Chicago on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The company...

... of an enormous wreath of flowers tied with the Belgian and American colors with words of tribute printed in gold. We sang at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague, before going to France, where we were to appear at the Theatre Champs Elysees, Paris. The Elysees revealed itself a theatre elegant as the audience...

..., and the intellectual shared the blues and swayed to the beat of the jazz musicians" (93). What these black people from various ways of life felt about Harlem in the twenties and early thirties is captured in the rhythms, phrasings, and spirit of the Harlem literati's works. Woll, Allen. Black Musical Theatre: From...

... is the only musical expression that maintains authenticity and autonomous power is what Ross denotes as the "demonizing" of commercial music (70). He cites a Langston Hughes poem, "Notes on Commercial Theatre," as an example: You've taken my blues and goneYou sing 'em on Broadway And you sing 'em in Hollywood...

... the church rather than the theatre or concert hall, and the one weakness of the book is that it does little if anything to settle the question as to what place the Negro spiritual should occupy in the category of the world's best music. The volume is well printed and in spite of the discrepancies pointed out...

... individualizing elements in the character of the race that produced them. II But as such an index of character, Negro music, at the very outset, made a bad start. The singing and dancing in a New Orleans theatre of "Jim Crow," a Negro folk nonsense-ballad by a Negro cripple who was able to flop himself about...

..., they are subject to the processes of myth and ritual out of which all folklore is derived. Ralph Ellison makes a similar point in a review of Baraka's Blues People: Classic blues were both entertainment and form of folklore. When they were sung professionally in theatres, they were entertainment; when danced...

.... Regarding his other contributions the Negro has not been so lucky. Dancing, so far as it is a native art in America, has been dominated almost absolutely by Negro influence. For generations "buck and wing," and "stop time" dances, which are strictly Negro, have been familiar to American theatre audiences...

... wrote for the Syracuse Festival Chorus, and which was performed by them and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, with Mr. Lambert Murphy soloist, Keith's Theatre, Syracuse, May 41 19211 marks, so far as I know, the first attempt to develop the spiritual into an oratorio form. But the fact that practically...

... Concert of Sacred Music. Black, Brown and Beige Black, Brown and Beige is Duke Ellington's classic tone parallel to the Negro people, which he employed as the foundation for his socially significant revue, My People, presented in 1963 at the Arie Crown Theatre at McCormick Place in Chicago on the occasion...

... mother bought that house as well as other property in Little Rock. This was a city comparable to other American cities of that era, with many fine homes, theatres and a thriving business section. Even so, it was not far removed from typical rural life: women in sunbonnets, farms, cane fields. About five...

... Warnings, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 5 (New York: New Direction Books, 1976), 260 . Doing Theology with Willie Nelson 259 all seats are the same price. There at the concert old and young, rich and poor, kickers and hippies, conservatives and liberals sit side by side, and all seem...

...: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 37. 28. Carlton W. Molette and Barbara J. Molette, Black Theatre: Premise and Presen- tation (Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall, 1986), 75 . 29. Queen Latifah, "Come into My House," All Hail the Queen (Tommy Boy...

... choir of mixed voices, and orchestra. It was performed by the Syracuse Festival Chorus and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra at Keith's Theatre in Syracuse on May 4, 1921.2 Dett claimed that this work marked the first known attempt to develop the spiritual into oratorio form.3 The Ordering of Moses...

..., Nigger Heaven, took its title from an old term for the topmost gallery of the theater, a term he employed as a metaphor for Harlem. In it he has his protagonist, a "New Negro," Byron Kasson, exclaim: We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below...

...) was premiered in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris, as produced by the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and sets and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. A collaborative venture, notable for its many innovations in all the artistic forms involved, Le Sacre became...

..."; and we played the Palace Theatre. And we were the type of group, the Larks, we played mostly white places, big places. And we stayed with the Larks awhile, and I got tired of the Larks and so we just broke up. My family was in North Carolina all this time. My wife was teaching down there in Reidsville...

... of Still's compositions in Paris on November 19, 1945, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées.29 These and other accomplishments of Still's third stylistic period led such concert singers as Roland Hayes, Lil­ lian Evanti, and Mattiwilda Dobbs to write the composer requesting original vocal works they could...