Throughout his career, George C. Wolfe has consistently been less influenced by the theatre than by film. Whether as the playwright of considerable promise who brought us "The Colored Museum" (1986), or as the director of considerable skill who put on "Jelly's Last Jam" (1992) and "Angels in America" (1993) and now runs New York's Public Theatre, he has always been a savvy populist at heart; he knows that the theatre has become an art form for the relatively few, but that it can be reinvigorated by the grammar of movies, which almost everyone speaks. The scenes he writes rarely drag, and the shows he stages often use blackouts to signal shifts in time and perspective which would otherwise have to be explained in onerous dialogue. Wolfe's love of movies and the jazzy rush he gets from making images work onstage with a cinematic smoothness are nowhere more apparent than in "Harlem Song," at the Apollo Theatre, a show he wrote and directed. "Harlem Song" is essentially a revue, using both old and new compositions, selected or written by Wolfe and the show's talented music supervisors, Zane Mark and Daryl Waters. It has no dialogue to speak of—or, at least, no dialogue that contributes significantly to the plot or helps to convey the historical time line that frames each set piece. Instead, Wolfe relies on fadeouts and title cards, as well as on filmed testimonies projected on a screen above the stage, to tell us where we are and what we should expect.
"Harlem Song" is divided into eleven sections—"The Harlem Renaissance," "La Imigración," "The Depression," and so on—each of which marks a particular moment in the neighborhood's social history. Wolfe's inventive staging begins in the nineteen-twenties, when the area became a Mecca for black artists, businessmen, hustlers, vamps, and writers who couldn't and wouldn't live anywhere but uptown. We watch two actors in silhouette, doing the cakewalk in front of a flickering movie screen— a nod to all those early flickers, the joyful minstrelsy captured by Thomas Edison and others. (It may also be a reference to the contemporary artist Kara Walker's controversial silhouetted figures of black people.) We have just settled into this cozy, "Ragtime"-derived scene when the Barefoot Prophet (David St. Louis), a young man with dreadlocks—a figure you might see on 125th Street today—bounds onstage. He is mad, he is brilliant, he is both our Greek chorus and our Fool. (He is also reminiscent of another movie character: the seer played by Amiri Baraka in Warren Beatty's "Bulworth.") The Barefoot Prophet gives us a kind of Harlem creation story, in which a shooting star falls and black people from all over the world make their way there to bask in its light:
All of 'em needin' N' feelin' n' believin' n' cryin' N' shoutin' n' defyin' n' laughin' n' testifyin' Swingin' singin' dancin' All of them dreamin' One word.
Joining the Prophet in song is the Clarion Caller (the terrific singer and actress B. J. Crosby), an oracle of sorts, whose turbaned head floats above a scrim onto which stars are projected.
Together, the Clarion Caller and the Barefoot Prophet embody the mystical spirit of Wolfe's Harlem. And they tell us what the show is all about: like Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and the novels of Terry McMillan, it is a form of "uplift art," whose aesthetic concerns are secondary to its desire to make "the people" feel good, about themselves and their community. The Harlem of "Harlem Song" is not an urban wasteland in the process of reinventing itself. It is a realm of legend and lore, and a mythical homeland, which it is our duty as theatregoers, as citizens, to celebrate. This is a point worth making, but not one that bears much repeating. And since there is little factual detail to support this portrayal, "Harlem Song" degenerates rather swiftly into propaganda. We see the neighborhood's fabulous past, and we hope for its fabulous future, all without quite knowing how Harlem became Harlem in the first place. It just is. And it's just wonderful.
That sense of wonder is the centerpiece of Queen Esther's performance as Miss Nightingale, who, in the Jimmie Lunceford ditty "Well Alright Then," takes us on a walking tour of the Harlem Renaissance. Miss Nightingale is a Dolly Levi of the 'hood. Flourishing her big black hat and her fox stole, she proclaims, "After years of wandering down alleyways and back roads . . . Negroes of the world at long last have boulevards broad enough for their attitude." Then, accompanied by a cast of refined, dressed-to-the-nines strollers, she points out all the glittering people in her Harlem—among them, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Walter White, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, and the cosmetologist and millionaire A'Lelia Walker. As Miss Nightingale rolls her eyes and struts her stuff, Wolfe shifts the emotional action of the show away from the Barefoot Prophet and the Clarion Caller's New Age African-Americans, swathed in a sort of spiritual kente cloth, to the New Negroes. Negroes have a style that is markedly different from that of African-Americans. Negroes do not wear turbans or head rags outside the house; they wear hats, cocked to the side, a visual indicator of real style—a style that encompasses both the black and the white American experience, rather than limiting itself to the dreary Pan-Africanism of colored people whose relationship to Africa is about as deep as the Eskimos'. The Negro makes do with what he has—and then he flaunts it.
As a writer, Wolfe is much more attracted to the Negro than he is to the African-American. This is what made "The Colored Museum" so enjoyable: he saw American "blackness" as a political construct that was ripe for lampooning. A series of sketches, "The Colored Museum" has a section, "The Last Mama on the Couch Play," that remains one of the funniest sendups of black realist theatre around. With "Harlem Song," Wolfe doesn't exactly betray his roots as a satirist, but he doesn't exploit them, either. He's torn between history and fashion, and he tries to please everyone. The virtually all-black cast is charming, but it's also inaccurate, especially when you're talking about Harlem in the nineteen-twenties. As is clear in Jervis Anderson's "This Was Harlem" and David Levering Lewis's "When Harlem Was in Vogue," what made the neighborhood so fascinating was its extraordinary ability to add a multitude of immigrant experiences to the Negro melting pot. "Harlem Song" has a brief, undeveloped section about the Latinos who created Spanish Harlem, which includes a Spanish-language version of "Take the A Train." (And never mind that anyone actually wishing to go to Spanish Harlem, which is on the East Side, would be better off taking the No. 6.) But we see almost nothing of the Jews who stayed on in West Harlem for years after Miss Nightingale's "niggerati" had moved uptown.
Wolfe's loyalty to blackness feels obligatory, as we journey forward in time through the forties, fifties, and sixties, and the show closes with a paean to "the tree of life" and a reprise of the Barefoot Prophet's shooting star. The action onstage, aside from Ken Roberson's controlled and often amusing choreography, is far less intriguing than the moving footage of real longtime Harlem residents which plays on the screen above the stage. We rely, for example, on one of these "witnesses" to tell us that Harlem's downfall, as a neighborhood and as a cultural force, in the early sixties was due largely to the destruction of family-owned homes and the construction of the projects that mar its landscape now. For blacks living in those hideous concrete structures, imprisoned rather than celebrated by their community, drugs and crime became the social order of the day—far more popular than, say, stopping off at the Schomburg Library before heading over to the Savoy or the Apollo. Indirectly, the witnesses testify to the deficiencies onstage. What their authenticity, and the remarkable editing of the footage, does show us is Wolfe's potential as a filmmaker. Take, for instance, B. J. Crosby, whose reappearance, partway through the show, as a blues singer riffing on the novelty song "For Sale" is one of the most hilarious and licentious things I've ever seen on the stage. She's a star, and Wolfe knows it. If he were to devise a movie for her, we'd have something that American cinema is truly lacking: the narrative of a real American Negro woman. She has the voice and the style for it, and Wolfe has the skill. The theatre only hampers his cinematic flair. ♦
