A midsummer night's sax comedy: the return of the lost Shakespeare jazz musical | Stage | The Guardian

It has the hottest musicians, the coolest singers, and "Bottom" played by Louis Armstrong. However, Swingin' the Dream was a $2 million failure. Can RSC emerge in this big band?

James Shapiro

Swingin' dream hen

On November 29, 1939, the creators of this jazz version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" were full of expectations. The music alone is worth entering. Among the popular songs are "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Love I", "Jeepers Creepers" and "Darn That Dream". All of these are intertwined with the swing music performed by Mendelssohn from the dream of the midsummer night of 1842. The music is performed by some famous people around: Bud Freeman's band plays on one side of the stage, Benny Goodman's interracial band on the other side, and Donald The center of Donald Voorhees directed a 50-person band.

The cast of Shakespeare’s musical has reached 150 people, including many of the most popular black artists in the United States, including Maxine Sullivan (playing Titania), Junoo Hernandez (playing Oberon) and Louis Armstrong (playing Bottom). According to reports, the trumpeter rejected another Broadway-style jazz performance "Young Man with a Horn". Butterfly McQueen (aka Prissy in Gone With the Wind) plays Parker. Agnes de Mille (Agnes de Mille), a year later, she will create a new situation in the "black ceremony" for the newly formed black ballet company

, Supervise the choreography.

Dancers include the famous tap dance star Bill Bailey, three Dandridge sisters (playing the elf waiters in "Titania"), and 13 tireless annoying couples. The set design based on Walt Disney cartoons also looks great. Sullivan's "Titania" ascends to the throne on the "Tomorrowland" electric wheelchair, the microphone appears in the shape of a snake and a caterpillar, and a pull-down bed is hung from a tree.

It seems destined to be popular, and it is surprisingly original. but

Swingin' the Dream closed after only 13 performances and caused its investors to lose a staggering $100,000, equivalent to today's $2 million. Critics continued to debate what went wrong. Despite extensive searches, no script for the play was found except for a few pages in "Pyramus" and "Thisbe," which has been plagued by critics. Towards the end of the short performance, CBS Radio played Sullivan and Armstrong’s songs and scenes, but the recording was also lost.

Now, eighty years have passed. The Royal Shakespeare Company, Yanwick Theatre and New York’s New Audience Theatre have joined forces to sing a "concert in progress" based on the live music of the performance.

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. For Young Vic's art director, "I am eager to integrate the two great art forms of jazz and poems, and use this to express the American national condition at that time, and it can now be explored".

The creators of the show, Erik Charell and Gilbert Seldes, wrote musicals in New Orleans in the 1890s. The show reminds players that "Athens of the South" is the birthplace of the swing. Philip Carter provided a useful summary of the adaptation in his review of the main black newspaper in New York, The Amsterdam News. The point is that this story revolves around the wedding of the governor of Louisiana. The two men who worked for him were secretaries and loved his cousin's daughter.

This made another southern beauty-loving a young man-leave in the cold. Carter wrote that "Hands of the Plantation" decided to implement "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a wedding entertainment. The four lovers walked into the magic forest, where their love was entangled first, and then they were entangled by the king of Oberon. The curse made it refreshing. Elf. All of this provided the background for Jackie Mabley and her actors to stumble and simulate their theatrical rehearsal. "

White actors acted as governors and his circle, black actors played "rude manipulators" and lived many spirits in the woods. While strengthening class and race boundaries, it breaks gender boundaries. Koons, played by the talented comedian "Moms" Mabley, is a midwife, and Alberta Perkins, a chef, is the "Pearl of Peace". Snook is a cleaner, Snout is a high-altitude man, Flute is an iceman, and Louis Armstrong's bottom is a fireman.

Seldes and Charell hope to capitalize on the success of the previous year's "Syracuse Boy" (the boy in Syracuse), Shakespeare's first major musical based on "The Comedy of Error". The all-white cast made full use of the swing and performed 235 performances. The hallmark feature of emerging Shakespeare’s musicals is hybridity: fusion of musical styles, fusion of Shakespeare’s language and contemporary American idioms, fusion of vulgarity and vulgarity – in Swingin’s "dream" hybrid race, it is "Kiss Me", "Kate" "And "West Side Story" set a precedent. But achieving the right mix is ​​not easy.

The contemporaries gave various explanations for the failure of the performance. Some people accused the venue of being a cavernous central theater with a capacity of 3,700 people. As a post-mortem

The Theatre Arts Monthly said: "The terrible distance makes the audience no different from dancers and music. Even the piper of Manhattan, Benny Goodman himself cannot attract him from the obscure waste of the huge and overly elegant auditorium. Followers.” The review praised the “absolute quality and burden” of the work, but concluded that “there is no acting skills, no clever direction or plan, these can make a brilliant idea assembled into a working one. overall".

John Mason Brown wrote in the "New York Post" that the show is on the stage of "dramaticizing Shakespeare" and staying on dance and music at its best , And added that, so closely integrated with the original, the creators of the show “can please the school. But they silenced Mr. Goodman and Mr. Armstrong for too long.” Brooks Atkinson (Brooks Atkinson) ) Go further in his works

Times

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I want to know if the show will "completely forget Shakespeare" and do better.

Although the show has never had an outing to solve its problems, the Pittsburgh Courier reported that after the opening night, "it has been modified in a hurry and it has been greatly improved." If the operation is extended, it may become sharper. But many of its performers earn more than $6,000 a week, not including Benny Goodman's band. Faced with empty seats in the huge theater, the producers had to give away tickets. According to the "New York Times" report, on the Thursday before closing, the place was packed, but the ticket for that night was only $596. Although the price of the seats (the most expensive cost $2.2) has been deliberately lowered, the show failed to attract white audiences, and it did not seem to spend much effort to cultivate black theater audiences.

Has Swingin'the Dream reached Broadway long ago? White audiences certainly did not seem to have paid the price for watching the black performer Shakespeare. You can understand this attitude in the dismissal in Time Magazine

Announcing that "a bard without self-esteem will follow the prey of this bastard", and the Boston Globe informs readers that "the actor will be black."

However, musicals also have a lot of time and are not limited to swing music. No matter how progressive the creators imagine their performances, they are unwilling to give Black Star the freedom to improvise at the core of the swing, but to reduce them to degraded gentleman roles. Black critics are particularly sensitive to this. William G Nunn wrote an article in Pittsburgh Messenger, accusing Charell of failing to "make his superstar himself."

Bud Freeman, one of the few white artists in the work, later wrote in his autobiography: "If Charell knew the greatness of black people, then he could have continued to carry out reforms." The creative control of the performance reflects the world of the script, which does not help. In the play, white actors are in charge and black actors play "planting hands".

If one of the actors is annoyed by this, no one in the record says so. In 1939, as the Great Depression continued into its tenth year, black actors faced difficult choices. At least in the theater world, the situation has improved since the government established the Federal Negro Theater (part of the New Deal Federal Theater Project) in 1936, and the Federal Theater Project has saved the careers of many unemployed actors.

While finding a job in difficult times is a good thing, is it too expensive to accept stereotyped roles? Philip Carter asked a lot in "Amsterdam News": "Some people may feel that when 150 blacks raise their salaries, the'dream' deserves the same support from any other company. However, The same lofty ideals will make others feel that this kind of support will only push the distant future into the distant future. That day, black actors and black art will be recognized without feeling frivolous and funny.

As the Pittsburgh Courier reported, Swingin's Dream suddenly closed, and "more than 200 performers have entered the job list, most of whom are people of color." Six months later, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Non-U.S. Activities shut down the entire Federal Theater Project, deeming it as subversive, and announced that it constitutes a "critical component of racial equality", which will greatly reduce the number of black actors in the United States. opportunity. Teaching method and practice".

The live concert is likely to be a harbinger of Shakespeare in the post-pandemic world, and theater companies will look back on the past as they move toward a more inclusive and cooperative future. If this is the case, the story of "Swinging Dreams" embodies both this future danger and hope for the future. At the same time, in a locked state, it would be a good thing to hear some extraordinary jazz music and imagine the great Satchmo on his horn to breathe new life into Bottom's "rareest" dream.

. James Shapiro is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Shakespeare in "A Split America".