Celebrating Black History Month: Broadway Milestones You Ought to Know

February is Black History Month, and Broadway.com is spotlighting some of the contributions black artists have made to Broadway. Here are the power players, major events and groundbreaking shows.

1898 - First All-Black Show Produced at a Major House
The premiere of the one-act musical Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, technically didn’t take place in a theater. The extended after-show featured an all-black cast and took place on the roof garden of the Casino Theatre, a Broadway venue, in front of an exclusively white audience.

1903 - In Dahomey
The first full-length musical comedy to feature an all-black cast and writing team to play inside a major Broadway theater would come later. Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy, which satirized the “back to Africa” movement of the early 19th century, ran for 53 performances at the New York Theatre, going on to tour nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, this was also one of the many shows in which black actors appeared in blackface.

1920 - Charles Gilpin, the First African-American Honored by the Drama League
Charles Gilpin broke onto the scene as the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones when the play premiered on Broadway. The Drama League named him as one of 10 people who impacted the American theater that year but didn’t invite him to the awards dinner because of his race. After O’Neill led a protest for the League to do the right thing and invite Gilpin, the organization obliged.

1921 - Shuffle Along
Shuffle Along marked the first full-fledged Broadway musical with an all-black cast, playwright, composer and lyricist. The show was a hit, running for about 484 nights on Broadway, a record at the time, according to The New York Times. Shuffle recently came back into the mainstream when George C. Wolfe wrote and directed an adaptation that also detailed the backstage saga of the original’s creation. The production featured Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Joshua Henry, Billy Porter, Adrienne Warren, Brandon Victor Dixon and more.

1935 - Porgy and Bess
George and Ira Gershwin penned this opera, featuring an all-black cast of classically trained singers. Even though it has been criticized for stereotyping African-Americans with depictions of drug abuse, poverty and prostitution, it has been revived on Broadway seven times, most recently in the 2012 Audra McDonald- and Norm Lewis-led production.

1950 - Juanita Hall, the First Black Performer to Win a Tony
Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary in the original 1949 production of South Pacific, was the first African-American performer to win a Tony Award. The actress has 12 other Broadway credits to her name, including Flower Drum Song, and she starred in the film versions of both musicals.

1959 - Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun Premieres on Broadway
Inspired by fellow African-American writer and Broadway playwright Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” (also known as “A Dream Deferred”), Lorraine Hansberry’s legendary play opened on Broadway in 1959. The story follows a black family at odds over how to transcend disenfranchisement and segregation in 1950s Chicago. The play has had two Broadway revivals and a musical adaptation, Raisin.

1967 - Pearl Bailey’s All-Black Hello, Dolly!
In what might be seen as a radical casting move even today, in 1967, the entire Broadway cast of Hello, Dolly! turned over to welcome an all-black cast, led by actress and singer Pearl Bailey as Dolly Levi. The reviews for Bailey and the new cast were glowing, and the production ran for another two years. Bailey received a 1968 Special Tony Award for her performance.

1969 - James Earl Jones Makes Tony History
For his leading turn in The Great White Hope, James Earl Jones was awarded Best Actor in a Play at the Tony Awards, the first African-American winner in any play category. The acting legend is also one of the few artists to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award, giving him the status of EGOT.

1975 - Geoffrey Holder Makes History with The Wiz
Geoffrey Holder was the first African-American director to win Best Director of a Musical, as well as the first to win Best Costume Design in a Musical. He won both trophies for The Wiz!, another seminal musical that featured an R&B/soul score and an all-black cast.

1984 - August Wilson's Broadway Debut
The playwright launched his Broadway career and legendary cycle of plays, beginning with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which is about a group of blues musicians in the 1920s. He would go on to make an enormous impact in American theater with his works chronicling the 20th-century African-American experience such as Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which have both received Broadway revivals. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and his Jitney won Best Revival of a Play at the Tony Awards in 2017. 

1996 - Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk
Director George C. Wolfe collaborated with the prodigious, young choreographer Savion Glover to bring the story of the black experience in America to vivid life onstage, from the days of slavery to the advent of hip-hop. The production, which showcased tap dance, won five Tony Awards, including trophies for Wolfe, Glover and featured actress Ann Duquesnay.

2002 - Suzan-Lori Parks Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Suzan-Lori Parks is the prolific playwright behind off-Broadway triumphs The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, In the Blood and the Public Theater’s upcoming White Noise. The Broadway staging of her play Topdog/Underdog, directed by George C. Wolfe, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making her the first black woman to be honored. Fellow black playwright Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017.

2002 - Whoopi Goldberg completes her EGOT
Whoopi Goldberg is the first and only black woman on the shortlist of EGOT achievers. She has an Emmy for the Hattie McDaniel documentary Beyond Tara, a Grammy for the recording of her 1986 Broadway solo show and an Oscar for her role in Ghost. After winning her first Tony in 2002 for producing Thoroughly Modern Millie, she completed her quadruple crown.

2014 - Audra McDonald Sets the Tony Awards Record
When Audra McDonald won the 2014 Best Leading Actress in a Play Tony for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, she set two records, becoming the first performer ever to win six Tony awards, and also the first to win in all four acting categories.

2016 - Four Acting Tony Categories, Four Black Winners
The revolutionary musical Hamilton swept the 2016 Tonys, including wins for three of its leads: Renée Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom Jr. and Daveed Diggs. Cynthia Erivo, the standout talent from that season’s revival of The Color Purple, joined the all-black acting winners circle with a trophy for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.

2018 - George C. Wolfe Reigns as the Most Nominated African-American Theater Artist
Renowned writer-director George C. Wolfe has brought to Broadway works like Angels in America, Jelly's Last Jam and The Wild Party. He is the most Tony-nominated black theater artist, with 23 Tony nominations and five wins. He was most recently nominated for directing The Iceman Cometh in 2018.

2019 and Beyond - Continued Color-Blind and Color-Conscious Casting
There is still a long way to go toward racial equality, but strides have been made by black actors who have recently originated, replaced or gone on as an understudy as characters that have usually been perceived as white. Some wins for representation in the past few years include Norm Lewis as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Nicolette Robinson as Jenna in Waitress, Joshua Henry as Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Aisha Jackson as Anna in Frozen, Michael Luwoye as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton, Brittney Johnson as Glinda in Wicked and Christiani Pitts as Ann Darrow in King Kong.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Broadway.com (@broadwaycom) on Feb 19, 2019 at 8:47am PST

Additional research by Caitlyn Gallip