Word: blues
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...February, not December, but this Tuesday, Harvard will have its chance to pull off one of the greatest upsets in college sports when Danny Ferry and the Duke Blue Devils come to Cambridge...
Infuse a 1940s Harlem nightclub act with a Busby Berkeley film's lavish budget, elbow room and staging style, restrain the raunch and remove the racial bitterness. The result: Black and Blue, the sumptuously spectacular $5 million revue that opened last week on Broadway. If Fred and Ginger had been black and still able to live in that elegant fantasy world, their shows might have looked a lot like this: rows of tap dancers in tailcoats or scarlet evening gowns; vast sets like lacquered jewel boxes gliding across the floor and opening to reveal a kick line; a singer...
Ruth Brown, who can still shout down the rafters in St. Louis Blues, shows her kittenish side and trademark mock anger in the double entendre If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on It. Her husky, lisping Body and Soul, however, comes off as a Carol Channing impersonation. Linda Hopkins, a 1972 Tony winner (Inner City), finds dignity in Come Sunday but loses it in her gleeful giggling about wife beating in T'aint Nobody's Bizness if I Do. While Carrie Smith displays a howitzer voice in I Want a Big Butter...
...Bunny Briggs, Lon Chaney and Ralph Brown. Glover reappears in a breakneck gymnastic number, hopping up and down stairs, while his elders return in slow, sentimental sequences to demonstrate the traditional tap presumption that less can be more. That is in contrast to the basic notion of Black and Blue, which seems to be that more is more. Yet in the understated moments when the stage is all but bare save for a performer at home with his craft, the show attains magic that could satisfy the haut monde and Harlem alike...
THEATER: Harlem goes to Broadway in Black and Blue...