![]() This poster is for a Washington tryout of a Houston Grand Opera production, prior to a Broadway run. ![]() – Wikipedia (edited) SIX GREAT AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICALS TREEMONISHA Will Marion Cook and the Johnson brothers had pursued new careers and Bert Williams moved to the Ziegfeld Follies and black musical theater went into a hiatus. Shipp, and Will Marion Cook.īy 1911, Bob Cole had died. So they thought back to the times in San Francisco and produced In Dahomey (1903) alongside Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jesse A. They then put together a number of small productions including A Lucky Coon, Sons of Ham, and The Policy Players, but their ultimate goal was to produce and star in their own Broadway musical. The duo’s performance of the cakewalk captured the audience’s attention, and they soon became so closely associated with this dance such that many people think of them as its originators. Their first collaboration was “Louisiana Lize”, a love song written in a new lyrical style that left out the watermelons, razors, and “hot mamas” typical of earlier “coon songs.”Ĭole and the Johnson brothers went on to create musicals such as The Belle of Bridgeport, The Red Moon (with Joe Jordan), The Shoo-Fly Regiment, In Newport, Humpty Dumpty, and Sally in Our Alley (featuring Bob Cole’s “Under The Bamboo Tree”).īert Williams and George Walker, called the “ Two Real Coons“, found fame in 1896 with a musical farce called The Gold Bug. ![]() Cole’s A Trip to Coontown was the first full-length New York musical comedy written, directed and performed exclusively by blacks.īob Cole and brothers John Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson focused on elevating the lyrical sophistication of African American songs. This began to change as African American composers and lyrists such as Will Marion Cook and Bob Cole brought black-written musical comedy to Broadway in 1898.Ĭook’s Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, an hour-long sketch, was the first all-black musical to play in a prestigious Broadway house, Casino Theatre‘s Roof Garden. African American Musical Theater Background:īefore the turn of the 20th th Century the idea of Black Musical Theater was a second-hand treatment of black life created by European-American performers, performing stereotyped “ coon songs” in blackface.
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