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An Archeologist on a Musical Dig: George C. Wolfe on Shuffle Along

Wolfe discusses the legendary musical from 95 years ago and what fires his enthusiasm for this current Broadway production.

An Archeologist on a Musical Dig: George C. Wolfe on Shuffle Along
Photo: Devin Alberda

Back in 2011, when George C. Wolfe was on a panel of theater professionals tasked to pick the top 10 American musicals of all time, he made a special plea for Shuffle Along, an all-black musical from 1921. “It has a great score that brought jazz dance to Broadway and invigorated the form,” argued the award-winning writer and director. It wasn’t the best musical, he explained, but it should be considered for its status as a phenomenon of the musical theater. Shuffle Along didn’t make the cut on that occasion, but the Tony Award-winning director of Angels in America and Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk can be very persuasive when he’s impassioned about something. Fast-forward a few years to the present and Wolfe has gotten the opportunity to mount a new production of the long-forgotten musical on Broadway.

Now sporting a new title, Shuffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, the trail-blazing musical gets a new lease of life this month with a stellar cast headlined by six-time Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald. Wolfe’s production retains the groundbreaking score by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and features a new libretto by Wolfe which replaces the original book by vaudevillians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The song and book writing teams who created the show have now become characters on the stage, portrayed by Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Joshua Henry. Wolfe talked to me recently about the legendary musical from 95 years ago and what fires his enthusiasm for this current Broadway production.

What first got you interested in Shuffle Along?

To this day it’s fascinating to me that Josephine Baker auditioned for this show when she was 15. She couldn’t get in until the following year because the legal age for working was 16. Paul Robeson joined the cast as a replacement during the run. Then you had the singer and performer Florence Mills, who was at the time probably one of the few international stars of American, British, and French theater. The show’s orchestrator was a man named Will Vodery, who orchestrated Florenz Ziegfeld’s shows, and who later did the orchestrations for Showboat. It was fascinating to discover that all these incredibly significant people from last century, who had such a far-reaching influence, walked through the doorway to the backstage of Shuffle Along.

Would you call it a landmark in American musical theater history?

The Sissle and Blake score is just extraordinary. I’m obsessed, driven by it. Blake wrote stunning, smart, energetic songs for the theater. Intrinsic in his sound is an incredible theatricality, but also the storytelling of the turn of the century: rags and waltzes and stomps and early jazz. So he becomes this very monumental transitional figure in the evolution of the American musical theater. Remember Show Boat [1927] hadn’t happened yet, and Oklahoma! [1948] didn’t exist. So, I think, in its day, Shuffle Along was a landmark piece—not flawless, but in terms of the various components and what it did theatrically, musically, culturally, it was phenomenal. It was also the first time that there was a dancing, hoofin’, women’s chorus. They were paraded out in beautiful, expensive costumes, with a chandelier on their heads or whatever, but this was the first time there was a chorus as a dynamic, sexy entity in the telling of the story. So, the more I found out [about the show’s history], the more intrigued and excited I became. And when I found out how significant the show was when viewed in its day, and how insignificant it is when viewed today, I just felt there was a story there in that discrepancy. It would be the same thing if 40 years from now nobody knew anything about A Chorus Line.

How does your new book differ from the original?

Well, Shuffle Along is like a 1920s musical. It had a whimsical silly little plot: a three-way mayoral race, a young couple in love, and a girl who’s a flapper. There’s the story of Shuffle Along and then there’s the history of the making of Shuffle Along. I was intrigued about the people who made the show. Nothing is being invented, because that history is extraordinary—and things are being mined. It’s not so much how Shuffle Along reflected on the lives of the people who made it, but in many respects how the lives of the people who made it informed the plot of Shuffle Along. For me, Miller and Lyles and Sissle and Blake were fascinating men. Three of them played characters in Shuffle Along. Blake didn’t, because he was the conductor. The dynamics of who they were as people, creators, and entertainers in 1921 New York City—when the city, America, and the world were changing very rapidly—is rich and compelling to me. It was fun going on an archeological dig on Shuffle Along, and then on the people who made the show, and figuring out how they reflect each other.

So you must have done a lot of research into this. Tell us a little bit about what you discovered.

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There’s a lot of digging. Blake lived longest, so there’s a lot about him. Sissle also lived long, and so did Flo Miller, but who celebrates the book writer, really? The composers, yes—everybody sings their songs. I just kept finding stuff. You read interviews with Sissle or Blake in the 1970s and they say they were forever partners, but then you read an interview in 1927 where you learn that they broke up and Blake says they don’t speak at times. Or you read that Lyles at one point bought a 1,500-acre plantation in Liberia and you wonder how someone who was touring on the Keith Albee circuit was able to do that. You find a document where Lyles’s wife sold her rights of Shuffle Along after her husband died for $1. What is that? I guess it all depends on who’s telling the story.

Florence Mills actually was a replacement. There was a woman named Gertrude Sanders who got rave reviews when the show opened and then left the show for another which never materialized. Then there was this woman named Lottie Gee, who was a prima donna opera singer. That’s who Audra is playing. She ended up having a very prolonged relationship with Blake. There’s a biography about Blake written by Al Rose, but Blake was married to this woman at the time who forbade Rose from putting too many details about his relationships prior to her. But then, in another book he wrote about jazz artists, Rose includes three pages of stuff that he couldn’t put in that biography about Blake. So all of a sudden you have all these details about Blake and Lottie. If I didn’t make theater, I would probably be a historian. I love digging and finding things.

How did the original show get made?

They were very different people who come together on this show. Miller and Lyles [the bookwriters] went to university. Sissle came from Indianapolis; his father was a pastor and his mother a teacher. Blake, on the other hand, came from Baltimore; his mother took in washing and his father was a stevedore. When Blake was 15, he got a job playing for a whorehouse and he made a ton of money. And Lottie Gee, who’d been working in showbiz forever, comes along and she and Blake form this incredible, intense personal relationship. People say she was the love of his life. I think he had a lot of loves in his life! And all that happened during Shuffle Along. When you go into a room and create theater, there’s unbelievable possibilities—intimate possibilities, creative possibilities, economic possibilities and there’s also other kinds of possibilities that aren’t necessarily so positive. But it’s all living in the room. It’s this magnified version of life, and that’s thrilling.

So the show is being created. They go out of town—to Trenton, to D.C., to Baltimore, and to Philadelphia—and the show is set to come to New York. But it’s $18,000 in debt. Because money was tight, the producer, John Cort, finds these trunks left in the basement of his theater that are filled with clothes from shows that had closed and that’s what they use for costumes. And they make musical numbers [based on] those costumes. The show eventually opens in May 1921, after the season has closed, at the 63rd Street Music Hall.

What was the cultural impact of the show?

Well, it ends up running for some 500 performances. Nothing ran that long in those days. Then there were three touring companies and the songs were recorded by every orchestra and bandleader of the time. [One of the songs, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” was later co-opted as a campaign song by Harry S. Truman for his presidential run in 1948]. Some of the smartest minds of the day had this extraordinary affection for the show: Critic George G. Nathan saw the show five times, and Gilbert Seldes talks extensively about it in his book The Seven Lively Arts. Al Jolson bought 300 tickets almost every Wednesday night; George Gershwin came to see the show week after week. Everyone in the Broadway community wanted to see the show. Some say it was Jolson, but the most common story is that it was Fanny Brice who said to the bookwriter Flo Miller that she wasn’t able to see the show because she was starring in her own show which had the same schedule. So they added special midnight shows for the actors starring in Broadway shows. Shuffle Along altered theater in a specific way, as it introduced syncopation and it changed how chorus girls moved in a show. It even altered driving patterns in New York City. West 63rd Street used to run both ways, but because there was so much traffic with people rushing to get tickets, they made it a one-way street. And it has remained so ever since.

Wasn’t this also the first time in the theater that audiences weren’t segregated?

Yeah, this was the show. Normally, black audiences were relegated to the balcony, but for Shuffle Along, they just sold the tickets. There was an article in Variety in 1921 that noted how close to the stage black people were seated. At the time, a lot of the artists lived and worked uptown in Harlem. With Shuffle Along, uptown and downtown met on 63rd Street with a kind of innocence and exuberance; this was the time when those two energies became one. There had been encounters before, but with this show that ran for as long as it ran—and many people credit the music and dancing of Shuffle Along with creating an extraordinary appetite. It’s when the slumming process began, with people from downtown starting to go to Harlem to hear this music every night. There was this exchange of energies and rhythms and ideas and storytelling when these two worlds met. Broadway became different because of Shuffle Along.

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You’ve talked about the impact Shuffle Along had nearly a century ago. What is it that stimulates you most as you work now on your new production?

I think I’m really intrigued by history, and who’s telling the story. Are you telling your story or is someone else? And I’m intrigued by where performance springs from. How does who you are, what you love, what you hate, what you’re terrified of, and what makes you full of joy inform you as an artist and the nature of your performance? What I love about the people who created Shuffle Along—that they were very smart, sophisticated people—is that they were driven by a very naïve sense of joy. I think of me, growing up in Frankfort, Kentucky, obsessed with theater, and coming to New York when I was 12 and seeing Broadway shows. I love being able to live fully inside the joyful exuberance of making something with other people. And that’s what Shuffle Along is about: the joy, the possibility that exists when people come together in a room and make something. And I get to celebrate that.

Shuffle Along opens on April 28 at the Music Box Theatre.

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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