Minstrel Time

Time hasn’t resolved all of the problems I had with The Scottsboro Boys, which has returned to New York for its Broadway incarnation. Reviewing the Off-Broadway production last spring, I wrote, “If David Thompson can rework his book to match Kander and Ebb’s hard-edged glare of a score, The Scottsboro Boys could be the most unsettling musical ever written.”

Thompson didn’t rework much, alas. Some critics have carped that this musical about the nine young African-American men falsely accused of rape in Alabama during the ’30s and convicted for it over and over again, doesn’t bring the nine men to life enough. I actually find the efforts to create nine distinct characters, all with little subplots, to be both hamfisted and detrimental to the minstrel show staging that frames the story. It’s as if every now and then, Thompson forgets that this musical is supposed to be uncomfortable, and gets carried away writing about Haywood Patterson (Joshua Henry) learning how to read in solitary confinement. Then he pulls himself up short and finds a way to gracefully transition to another irony-laced song from songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb.

Dull spots aside, there is a new breathlessness to director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s staging, an increased urgency that carries the audience away. With a slightly rejiggered cast (Henry is so good as Patterson that I forgot he didn’t originate the role earlier this year), the Scottsboro Boys seem to literally be tap-dancing for their lives. Backed up only by an array of chairs, two planks and some inventive staging, these are triple-threat performers of the kind we rarely get to see anymore.

All the cast unreservedly embraces the minstrel trappings. Henry’s first powerful moment comes while being questioned by the arrogant, racist Alabama police officers. Giving them what they expect, Henry opens his eyes wide and shuffles in place, drawling the song “Nothin.’” But Henry is spell-binding throughout. Christian Dante White and James T. Lane, as the white women claiming to have been raped by the men, are both amusing and chilling (particularly Lane as Ruby during a song recanting her perjury); Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon are unsettlingly comfortable as minstrels Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, turning their comic precision against the audience.

The real drama of The Scottsboro Boys, as is true of any Broadway show dealing with race, is in the audience. Hearing the well-heeled, middle-class, largely white audience members (who have blithely shelled out $100 per seat) chuckle appreciatively as Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo betray themselves by slavishly mocking the Scottsboro Nine is frustrating. The air of liberal smugness is often suffocating, bleeding over into how the audience behaves (the woman behind me thought nothing of holding forth in a lengthy explanation to her friend of who George Wallace was during the show).

That sense of congratulatory back-patting is surely one of the causes of Thompson’s most jaw-dropping narrative devices: an unidentified woman (Sharon Washington) who watches the proceedings with an insufferable air of noble piety. We only learn her identity in the very final moments, which are almost enough to destroy the entire experience. Of course, Washington is also prone to over-exaggeration: Everything she does is aimed at the cheap seats in the back, from ostentatiously sniffing the cake box she primly holds in her lap, then cocking her head and smiling at it in pleasure, to her overly aggrieved expressions throughout. She’s a constant and wholly unnecessary reminder that what we’re watching is a minstrel show retelling of a major cultural trauma in America. At its worst moments, The Scottsboro Boys ladles on irony with an industrial-sized ladle; at its best, it’s a reminder that entertainment and a social conscience are not incompatible.

The Scottsboro Boys

Open run, Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St. (betw. 6th Ave. & B’way), 212-239-6200; $39.50–$131.50.