The Scottsboro Boys

“Hey, Hey, Hey,Hey” don’t be fooled by the razzle-dazzle. Yes, there’s tap dancing, cakewalks, fantasy, over-the-top Dixieland energy and sharp lyrics, but John Kander and Fred Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys is not your escapist musical comedy. This minstrel show frames an intense cause célèbre, a loathsome tale of racism put to music and unnervingly played out in lavish Technicolor. Traditionally, minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface. In this caustic turnabout, all but one of the performers are all African-American, many playing white men and women, often in blackface. The only white actor is John Cullum as the Interlocutor, a judge and the Alabama governor.

Dark subjects are not unknown in musical theater. Next to Normal deals with mental illness and Carousel touches on spousal abuse. Kander and Ebb have delved into the dark side in several of their musicals—the icy murderesses in Chicago, the Nazis in Cabaret, the Great Depression in Steel Pier. In The Scottsboro Boys, they take the 1931 case of nine teenagers removed from a train in Scottsboro, Alabama, who were falsely convicted of raping two white women and sent to Death Row. They remained imprisoned over numerous appeals and new trials. The case eventually led to two groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions that prodded the civil rights movement.

The play originally opened off Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre and spent a summer at the Minneapolis Guthrie Theatre before its current opening on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater.  While bookwriter David Thompson’s main point of view is still that of of  “the Scottsboro Boys,” one character, Haywood Patterson (Joshua Henry), is more fleshed out with fury and personal integrity, refusing to admit to a crime he did not do and demanding to tell the true story. He stamps his role with gravitas and pays for his determination. Henry is a replacement for the original Patterson, Brandon Victor Dixon, who has moved into the cast of the upcoming Ray Charles musical. Other replacements in the Broadway version are James T. Lane as Ozzie Powell and Jeremy Gumbs, who is especially touching as the youngest of the boys, anxious to go home for his thirteenth birthday.

Notable as two archetypal minstrel characters. Mr. Bones (Colman Domingo) and Mr. Tambo (Forrest McClendon) also play racist white law enforcers. As sheriff, Mr. Bones promises, "We's gonna give you the Dixie justice you deserve." The two also portray the lawyers, including Samuel Leibowitz, who is brought down from New York City to appeal the boys’ first guilty verdict. Christian Dante White and James T. Lane play the cartoonish “white trash" accusers, Ruby and Victoria. Throughout the show, an unidentified woman (Sharon Washington) wanders somberly, watching, waiting, but not participating. At the end, her significance becomes clear, neatly tying up the story.

While there is familiarity to the Kander and Ebb songs, they round out the story with wit and intelligence. Haywood’s yearning to “Go Back Home" is truly poignant.  McClendon, as Leibowitz, singing "That's Not the Way We Do Things," satirizes the hypocrisy of Northern liberalism claiming—“There's no bigger voice for equal rights than me…/Just ask my chauffeur Rufus/Just ask our colored laundress/And I'm sure they'll agree." This is cleverly countered by Domingo as Alabama Attorney General warning in "Financial Advice," that, “Let me tell you, Sonny/There's nothin’ like Jew money." Chilling are the genteel old harmonies of "Southern Days" that distort the idyllic Dixie images into “strange fruit” hanging from a poplar tree.

Director/choreographer Susan Stroman keeps a tight, balanced tone on this production. Her skilled choreography is relevant, highlighted in the nightmarish electric chair segment where the teenagers hoof around the electric chair. Beowulf Boritt's minimalistic set features three large frames, each as crooked as the prevailing justice. There is especially inventive use of a group of silver chairs that connect as needed to form a cell, a bus, a train. It is most effective when Heywood escapes from jail and races around the stage, weaving in and out, running and hiding between the chair formations. Ken Billington’s lighting is as theatrical as sound designer Peter Hylenski’s drama of drum beats. Costumer Toni-Leslie James dresses the minstrel performers in crayon colors contrasting against the drab of the prisoners’.

All these meticulous elements add up to an unusual production of showmanship and punch. The Scottsboro Boys could be the winner of the season.

(Pictured: Colman Domingo, Forrest McClendon with John Cullum (center back); Photo by Paul Kolnik)

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Cabaret Scenes
November 4, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org