Colman Domingo as Mr. Bones and Forrest McClendon as Mr. Tambo. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
The latest musical to open on Broadway, at the Lyceum, is The Scottsboro Boys, with music and lyrics by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, the same team that gave us Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman and the iconic song “New York, New York.” The book is by David Thompson.
Playbill describes the show thusly:
In Alabama of 1931, nine African-American teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19 were falsely accused and wrongly convicted of raping two white Southern belles. The 13-year-old didn’t know what rape was, and, even when one of the “soiled doves” recanted her story, the conviction stood—but wobbly. Through various appeals and the intervention of a wiseacre New York Jewish lawyer, the prisoners were freed in a piecemeal fashion over the years, some remaining until after World War II and one not making it out alive at all. Powered by Southern bigotry, it was a lie that could have lynched them. As it was, nine lives were needlessly and drastically disfigured.
To this sad and shameful chapter in our history, Kander and Ebb give us old razzle-dazzle. Pouring cynicism and glitz into old wounds is a favorite tactic of theirs, and it has resulted in their best shows. Look how brazenly they strutted their stuff in the face of Nazism (Cabaret) and sensationalized murder trials (Chicago).
In The Scottsboro Boys they have again audaciously seen fit to relay the grim facts of this case in the form of an old-fashioned, socially incorrect minstrel show, replete with Interlocutor, a white emcee-narrator who occasionally pops up as a judge or governor meting out rough Southern justice. His two deputies occupy opposite sides of the stage, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, dispensing in the broadest strokes possible the white villains of the piece (sheriffs, lawyers, guards, clerks, et al). There is one woman in the show, black and mysterious, wafting through the proceedings with quiet dignity, silently observing, remaining mute till the last seven words of the play, which, it turned out, would alter the course of human history.
