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By Bart van Es

The death of Richard Burbage in 1619 caused a minor scandal. So lavish was the outpouring of grief that it threatened to overshadow official mourning for Queen Anne who had died a few days before. Shakespeare’s leading actor had a legendary status in the seventeenth century. It is also a minor scandal that he is not more famous today. While there is exhaustive scholarship on the playwright’s texts and sources, the earliest manuscript elegies for the man who first performed Hamlet, Lear, and Othello remain unedited and obscure. This is a shame not only because it is an injustice but also because it stops us seeing the way Shakespeare worked.

It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:

Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.

A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.

Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.

Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.

Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.

This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.

A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…

In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:

The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.

The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before.  His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved. 

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By Maya Slater

The farce is at its height: the old clown in the armchair is surrounded by whirling figures in outlandish doctors’ costumes, welcoming him into their brotherhood with a mock initiation ceremony. He takes the Latin oath: ‘Juro’, falters. His face crumples. The audience gasps – is something wrong? But the clown is grinning now, all is well, the dancing grows frenzied, the play rushes on to its end.

Not till the next day will the audience find out what happened afterwards. They carried the clown off the stage in his chair, and rushed him home. He was coughing blood, dying. He asked for his wife, and for a priest to confess him. They failed to arrive before he died.

It happened 340 years ago, on 17 February 1673, but his magnificently ironic death is still central to the French understanding of Molière. He is their greatest comic playwright, unique in that he also directed his own plays and wrote his greatest parts for himself. Centuries later, this still gives the modern audience a frisson. In The Hypochondriac, sick with TB (he had his fatal seizure during the fourth performance), Molière himself spoke the following words:

‘Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: “Go on, drop dead!”

Writing those words anticipating his own death was surely tempting fate, but long before his last play, audiences had got used to seeing Molière on stage speaking lines which seemed to cast an ironic light on his own life. Nine years earlier, in The School for Wives (1662), the first of his great verse comedies, he played the part of a ridiculous old bachelor determined to marry an innocent young girl decades younger than him. Instead, the girl escapes with a young man her own age. The audience knew that Molière himself had recently married Armande – he was 40, she was 22. What must they have thought when he portrayed a thwarted older lover, gnashing his teeth in rage and frustration as his young bride escaped from his clutches?

A year later, Molière’s self-mockery has grown more explicit. The new play is The School for Wives Criticised, a short, informal sketch, ridiculing Molière’s critics in an argument about The School for Wives. Significantly, Molière didn’t defend his own play onstage.  Instead, he himself played an absurd Marquis, who attacks Molière and his work: ‘I’ve just been to see it… It’s detestable.’ ‘Talk to us about its faults,’ says someone. ‘How should I know? I didn’t even bother to listen,’ replies the Marquis.

Molière’s second riposte to his critics, which again took the form of a short polemic play, The Impromptu at Versailles, was strikingly new, and still feels fresh and exciting today. We see Molière (who just this once played himself) and his troupe in rehearsal, trying desperately to get a performance together for the King and Court to see. The actors are uncooperative and annoying, which enables Molière to show himself trying to cope with them. He presents himself as unable to keep control of his unruly cast, breaking out in frustration: ‘Don’t you realise, I’m the one who carries the can…?’ When they finally start their rehearsal, Molière interrupts it to comment on The School for Wives, and to make some interesting general observations on acting. The play they are rehearsing  is a conversation between two stupid courtiers. Molière again takes the part of the silly Marquis, and once more launches a comic attack on himself: ‘You’re desperate to justify Molière… don’t you think your Molière is played out [?]’ And then comes a moment unique in his work, where he takes over another actor’s part, and speaks as himself, in defence of his own art: ‘Wait a minute, You want to say all that a bit more emphatically. Listen, this is how I want it spoken…’

Of course the burning question must be: what was Molière like as an actor, and how did he perform his roles? We know he wore a heavy black moustache. We can assume that he excelled at portraying comic rage and frustration, from the number of furious outbursts he wrote for himself to perform. He put himself in ridiculous situations, hiding under the table in Tartuffe, performing a clumsy dance in The Bourgeois Gentleman, fleeing in terror dressed as a woman in M. de Pourceaugnac. But perhaps the most vivid account of his acting is found in a malicious satirical portrait written by the son of a rival actor:

‘He enters, nose to the wind, on bow legs, one shoulder thrust forward. His wig trails behind, stuffed full of bayleaves like a ham. He dangles his hands rather carelessly by his sides. His head sits on his back like a pack on a mule. He rolls his eyes. When he speaks his lines, the words are punctuated by endless hiccoughs.’

By the end, racked with TB, his performances had become less physically demanding. And performing the role which killed him that February night 350 years ago, that of the ludicrous hypochondriac, he was having to insert lines to excuse his own coughing, and played the part sitting in the red velvet chair which is still preserved as their most precious relic by the Comédie française theatre.

Maya Slater is Senior Reseach Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She also writes fiction and reviews theatre and books. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays by Molière.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Molière as Julius Cesar by Nicolas Mignard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Stanley Wells In 1979 Oxford University Press appointed me as the founding head of a Shakespeare department. The Oxford Shakespeare, first published in 1891, had been rendered seriously out of date by advances in scholarship.

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By Stacy Wolf

On Christmas Day, the eagerly-awaited movie musical Les Misérables — “A Musical Phenomenon” the advertisement promises — opens across the United States. If it makes half the splash that its Broadway source did in 1987, we’re in for a long ride. The musical ran for 6680 performances, and won Tony awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. It closed and then re-opened for another 463-performance run in 2006. It continues to tour the US.

Extensive production gossip on the movie has focused on Anne Hathaway’s brave hair-shaving, braver weight loss of twenty-five pounds, and bravest willingness to sing live during filming. Director Tom Hooper has repeatedly noted the incomparable intimacy achieved by actors singing live on film. Barbra Streisand, at age 25, knew the same thing when she insisted on singing live for the film of Funny Girl in 1968 (she shared the Best Actress Oscar with Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter).

The 60 million people who have seen the stage version of the Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil musical will no doubt compare the movie to their memories of a dark and shadowy stage, the crowd of actors marching in step during the thrilling Act One finale of “One Day More,” the huge rotating barricade littered with fifty bloody bodies of the revolutionary students, and a breathtaking theatrical moment when the evil Javert jumps to his death off the upstage catwalk bridge.

Given Hathaway’s stardom, movie goers might also compare the film’s portrayal of the tragic Fantine with her stage character, played by Patti LuPone, Ruthie Henshall, Lea Salonga, and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Film critic A.O. Scott recently commented on the number of strong women in 2012’s movies. What will Les Miz bring us?

If it’s anything like the stage musical, don’t get excited, fellow feminists. For all of its theatrical heft, musical power, and romantic reputation, Les Miz leaves women in the lurch.

Women in the musical play small and insignificant roles. First, they appear late: Fantine’s first song halfway through Act One is a woman’s first solo, well after the male characters have been introduced and have sung and the story is well on its way.

Second, the three featured female characters — Fantine, Cosette, and Eponine — are delineated from the other minor female characters and ensemble players by their spiritual purity, a narrow female stereotype. Third, the women only exist to set off the complex decisions, ethical struggles, and brave actions of the men. Finally, the women only sing about men (though, according to the Bechdel test that Scott cites, there are more than two women in the show and they do have names: a hopeful sign, perhaps?).

The central story of Les Miz has nothing whatsoever to do with women, but rather follows the battle between Valjean and Javert. Dramaturgically, the women only function to strengthen the men’s characterizations. Fantine’s sole purpose, for example, is to show Valjean’s extraordinary generosity when he agrees to raise her soon-to-be-orphaned daughter, Cosette, as his own. Cosette serves as Marius’s love interest so that he can choose her over a political career. (Unlike the musicals of the 1950s where the individual lovers each signified political differences that the musical eventually resolved through their union, in Les Miz, the lovers are a mere diversion from the real plot, which is “political” and decidedly homoerotic.) And Eponine exists so that she can pine for Marius and die for his cause. During the stage musical’s production process, in fact, codirectors Trevor Nunn and John Caird worked with the composers to eliminate the women characters’ back stories and reduce their stage time.

Equally important for this stage production was the amazing sceneography, designed by Royal Shakespeare Company veteran John Napier. The musical’s Act Two climax, when two giant towers, weighing three tons and driven by computer, glide, merge, and interlock to form a stage-filling structure on which the bodies of dead rebel students lay signals how Les Miz sceneographically values men and their world. In his review of the Broadway production, Frank Rich in the New York Times described how “in a dazzling transition, the towers tilt to form an enormous barricade.” The male characters interact with the set from this barricade to the tower to the tavern. Valjean carries the wounded Marius through the sewers of Paris, evoked by fog and dim grey lighting, and even the villain Javert kills himself by jumping off a high bridge upstage, a moment that invariably elicits gasps from the audience when the actor disappears below the stage floor.

The musical’s principal women, on the other hand, are excluded from the impressive, visually engaging scenes. Each female character’s song is staged with her alone, almost as if in concert, apart from the story, performing in a single pool of light. Now there’s nothing wrong with an actor being onstage in a single spotlight: that’s what stars are made of. But according to the visual codes that tell an audience what’s important here, the women are shut out. Fantine sings both of her two songs in Act One alone, one before she succumbs to prostitution and the other — her big death song — on a cot; Cosette’s key number is staged in front of the gates of her house.

Eponine does a bit better: her showstopping “On My Own” begins with the actor walking on a slowly revolving platform, but by the second verse, the turntable stops and she stands still for the number’s climax.

Eponine does get one opportunity to interact with the musical’s remarkable scenery — in her death scene. Although her involvement with the students’ rebellion is not because she is political, but because she wants to be on the barricade to be near Marius, she gets caught in the crossfire. Marius takes her into his arms, soothing her and kissing her gently, and they sing, “A Little Fall of Rain,” leaning against by the barricade, and she dies. The message is clear in this touching moment: the women only get to be on Les Miz’s big set when they die.

This account of women’s sad situation in Les Miz relies on the languages of the stage. It may be that the film adaptation will give women more to do. Or maybe the tools of film will alter the architecture of this musical. Or maybe Hathaway — thin, bald, and singing “live” — will deliver a performance that will vindicate the women in Les Miz.

Stacy Wolf is Professor in the Program in Theater and the Director of the Princeton Atelier in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, and co-editor of the forthcoming paperback release of The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical.

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By Ann Saddlemyer

There had been rumours for months. When Dublin’s Abbey Theatre announced that John Millington Synge’s new play The Playboy of the Western World would be produced on Saturday, 26 January 1907, all were on alert. Controversy had followed Synge since the production of his first Wicklow play, The Shadow of the Glen, in which a bold, young, and lonely woman leaves a loveless May/December marriage to go off with a fine-talking Tramp who rhapsodizes over the freedom of the roads. Irish women wouldn’t do that!

In The Playboy the action takes place in a public house on the wild coast of Mayo, when a travel-stained stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring on-stage audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be – winning all the prizes at the races and the love of the publican’s daughter. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son who is not the courageous father-slayer after all. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the onstage crowd turns brutally on Christy, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father a third time. The play ends with father and son leaving together, dismissing the onstage audience with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth”.

The offstage audience, thrown off guard by the comedy of the opening scenes, erupted at the word “shifts” (a woman’s chemise) in the third act. Some were outraged by the intimation that not all Irish girls were pure or holy, others were shocked by the strong (and strange) language. All were doubtless bewildered by finding themselves laughing as church and the law are banished from a world eager for a hero, charmed by the language and the love story, then challenged again when the tale threatens to invade reality. Synge and his colleagues were in turn accused of “playing” with a nation’s ideals. The riots continued for almost a week. Yeats, eager to champion the rights of the artist, exacerbated matters by calling in the local police, and Dublin and beyond were agog with press reports of the playacting on stage at night and in the courts by day. The actors loyally performed in dumb show until the play at last had a full hearing. But even they were not always comfortable with the control exerted by the playwright through language and gesture, sometimes in their confusion making matters worse by causing their actions and speeches to be more realistic. And who could blame them?

Yet the playwright does not seem to have been aware of the response his play would cause, insisting that it was merely a comedy, an “extravaganza”, meant to entertain, and that “the story — in its ESSENCE — is probable, given the psychic state of the locality.” Not to this audience, who charged him with immorality, obscenity and blasphemy, “a sordid, squalid and repulsive picture of Irish life and character”, making a hero of “a foul-mouthed scoundrel and parricide”.

For three years Synge had painstakingly developed his original idea, producing more than a thousand typescript pages, drafts and scenarios, all the way to draft “K” before he finally hit on the brilliantly ambiguous final form. For a “playboy” may be an athlete, performer, seducer, trickster, manipulator, creator, hero, or all of the above; while “the western world” might refer to County Mayo, to the United States, or to this world as contrasted with that “eastern world” of folk and fairy tales — or to all. “What a blessing you did not go to version L, if Version K had such a disastrous effect!” a friend commented in the turbulent months that followed.

Like Christy’s own tale of slaying his Da, the story of his injuries to Ireland’s good name continued to grow with the years. When the Abbey theatre took the play on tour to the United States, the clash between the idea of a pure nationhood cherished by Irish immigrants and what they saw on stage was even more pronounced. In New York missiles were thrown on the stage, and a hundred police attempted to keep order. Lady Gregory, who led the tour, received death threats; Theodore Roosevelt’s presence at the second performance ensured a more sedate reception. But when the company arrived in Philadelphia all hell broke loose, and the players were hauled into court by an Irish-American patriot who accused the company and the play of indecency. The case was dismissed when the judge learned that the accusers had not read the text.

In the theatre individual response to what is clearly not real can quickly become an excuse for objecting to what is perceived to be real. Audiences have always felt justified in expressing their disapproval of what is staged, or attempted to be staged. In 18th century London theatre managers petitioned the King for a guard of soldiers; one manager engaged thirty prize-fighters as well. Destruction of scenery, benches and even musical instruments was all too common when the audience felt cheated; often foreign performers were pelted with rotten fruit and other missiles (and told to go home).

Patriotism was perhaps the most frequent cause, especially in Ireland where the stage Irishman, created by English dramatists, was a subject of mockery and ridicule, and where class, nationalism, and religion were inextricably entwined. In 1907 however the disturbance was premeditated, with members of the audience carrying in stink bombs, rotten vegetables, trumpets, whistles, and other paraphernalia. There was clearly an organized cabal determined to silence a work which is now considered a masterpiece of comedy, performed throughout the world and recently the centrepiece of a world tour.

Would such events happen today? We are much more accustomed to onstage violence; but censorship is still very much with us. Synge suggests that to hold a dream is better than to live with caution; the outsider serves to perpetuate the myth-making process while at the same time challenging it, introducing a heightened self-awareness which embraces community on both sides of the footlights. Thus the audience is caught off-guard, encouraged to enter the world of fantasy, then betrayed by a reality of a different sort — the dream itself can threaten if fulfilled; we are briefly dangled above two worlds at once.

Ann Saddlemyer has published extensively on Irish and Canadian theatre and edited the plays of Lady Gregory and the letters between the founding Directors of the Abbey Theatre. Her book Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She has most recently edited W.B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive, Boston [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Todd Decker

Show Boat is back on the boards, visiting four major opera companies in a new production of yet another new version. Originally debuted on Broadway in 1927, apparently Show Boat will never stop being remade. The new production, directed by Francesca Zambello, had its premiere at the Chicago Lyric Opera a year ago, an appropriate starting place as much of the second act takes place in the Windy City. A run at Houston Grand Opera is wrapping up this week. Washington National Opera follows in May, with a final stop at the San Francisco Opera in June.

I saw the production in Chicago and by casual reckoning—I don’t have a copy of the script—upwards of thirty percent of the dialogue is new. Several tried-and-true Show Boat laugh lines are gone: some new attempts at humor are in. Parthy’s repeated complaints about going to Chicago for New Year’s Eve (i.e. in the middle of winter) got a laugh in Chicago but might fall flat elsewhere. In general, this version isn’t as funny as some others, but opera house Show Boats—the first dates back to 1954—have typically emphasized singing over comedy.

Some things didn’t change in Chicago, in particular, the audience reaction to “Ol’ Man River.” At the performance I saw, applause stepped on the long held note that ends the song and resounded long and loud in the Lyric’s golden-walled theater. Morris Robinson in the role of Joe and the men of the black chorus held their final pose and soaked up the ovation for “Ol’ Man River” while the remainder of the cast waited for the show to resume. This moment—predictably—stopped Show Boat cold, and it’s been working that way since 1927. Why? Given that February is Black History Month, a look into the past might help explain why “Ol’ Man River” still stops Show Boat.

In September 1926, Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat was published to great fanfare. By December it was among the best-selling books of the year. Broadway songwriter Jerome Kern read Show Boat and immediately recognized it as a compelling basis for a musical show with the capacity to feature a black star of the moment singing music the white audiences of midtown, Jazz Age Manhattan were already cheering. Kern brought lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II onto the project. Among the first songs the pair wrote was “Ol’ Man River,” which Kern remembered was inspired not by Ferber’s book but rather by the sound of Paul Robeson’s voice.

Robeson—a black dramatic actor who had recently begun singing recitals of Negro spirituals—was at the height of his 1920s fame and it made sense to Kern, Hammerstein, and their producer Florenz Ziegfeld to feature Robeson as much as possible in Show Boat. Initially, they wanted Robeson to not only play Joe and sing “Ol’ Man River” but to also perform a set of Negro spirituals as himself in act two, accompanied by his regular pianist, the accomplished African American musician Lawrence Brown. Robeson and Brown’s all-spirituals concerts—the first was in April 1925 in Greenwich Village—were hugely successful with New York audiences. Crowds—predominantly white—reportedly lined up in the snow to buy tickets. Audiences cheered and wept, demanding encore after encore. Critics hailed the duo and regularly described what they offered as more than just a concert but an experience. Robeson was praised for expressing “all the plaintiveness of the colored race” with “a haunting tenderness, a wistful longing, an indescribable seeking for something just beyond, to be found in the voice of the Negro, and in no other voice.” Part of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, the Robeson-Brown recital experience captured contemporary white fascination with black music and performers in a tremendously attractive package.

Kern, Hammerstein, and Ziegfeld wanted to make the Robeson-Brown experience part of Show Boat. While Robeson resisted their plan and refused to play Joe in the original Broadway production, Kern and Hammerstein succeeded in bringing a black male voice before the white Broadway audience simply by way of “Ol’ Man River.” This spiritual-like Broadway song—with its soaring tune that echoes folk melodies and lyrics expressing the predicament of black Americans in ways the white audience could accept without feeling threatened—quickly became Show Boat‘s signature moment. Ferber remembered the reaction to Robeson as Joe in 1932—the first time he played the part on Broadway—this way: “I witnessed a New York first-night audience, after Paul Robeson’s singing of Ol’ Man River, shout and cheer and behave generally as I’ve never seen an audience behave in any theatre in all my years of playgoing.” Robeson sang Joe for the first time in London in 1928, where one reviewer noted “his performance is worth all the money you will pay for admission.” More than one review in the show’s long performance history echoes this astonishing claim that a single song sung by a character with no role in the plot was sufficient reason to sit through the entire show.

Is this reaction of a white audience to a black male singer still happening when contemporary audiences applaud “Ol’ Man River”? Morris Robinson, the Chicago Lyric Opera’s Joe, answered the question with some self-aware humor in a live interview posted online by the Chicago Tribune.

Watch the full interview and hear Robinson sing “Ol’ Man River”.

Robinson told the audience, ““Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a six-foot-three black guy, so “Ol’ Man River” is what they’re wanting to hear at the end of my concerts. And I make them wait.” Earlier in the interview, Robinson—like Robeson, an all-American college football player—described an encounter at the start of his singing career with the black bass Todd Duncan. (The original Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Duncan played Joe onstage in 1944.) Duncan vocalized Robinson a bit, then played a few notes from “Ol’ Man River” and told the young singer—who didn’t recognize the tune—that he’d be singing it many, many times. Robinson’s anecdote suggests the extent to which race is still destiny for African American singers on the musical and concert stage. For all the progress made in race relations in the more than eighty years since Show Boat first played to packed houses, white audiences still respond to a powerful black bass singing “Ol’ Man River,” making this famous song one reason Show Boat itself keeps sailing on.

Todd Decker is Assistant Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical and Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz, winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

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By Michelle Rafferty

What made Louis Armstrong embarrassed? Why was Cab Calloway on Sesame Street? To learn a little more about these two legends check out the podcast below with BBC Producer Alyn Shipton and the talented interviewer Annie Shipton (yes, that would be Alyn’s daughter).

Happy JAM (Jazz Appreciation Month)!


More Sesame Street…Cab teaches us how to jump AND jive:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To read up on Cab Calloway check out Alyn Shipton’s biography Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway. And for cool footage from Gail Levin’s new documentary Cab Calloway: Sketches go here!

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By Toril Moi Like other Norwegians I am in shock at the terrible events in Oslo and at Utøya on 22 July. My heart goes out to the victims and their families. I was not in Norway when the horror happened. On 22 July, I was giving a talk about Ibsen’s 1873 play Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre in London. I only learned about the bombing in Oslo and the massacre at Utøya later that night. When I discovered that the terrorist in Norway saw himself as

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Well? Have you? If not, it's probably because René Blum’s lifelong career in the arts has been safely hidden from the history books. Only his brother Léon Blum, the first Socialist and Jewish Prime Minister of France, received enormous attention. But Judith Chazin-Bennahum knows why René Blum deserves to be remembered: because he was an extraordinary man. Chazin-Bennahum’s book introduces the reader to the world of the Belle Epoque artists and writers, the Dreyfus Affair, the playwrights and painters who reigned supreme during the late 19^th century and early 20^th century period in Paris. Below she provides us with just a few of his most impressive accomplishments.

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