Lena Horne's long-forgotten Broadway debut

The label "hardest working person in showbiz" is every so often pinned on some performer who is deft at multi-tasking or who seems to be miraculously running on fumes (or clones). Apparently, the phrase was first put to use to describe James Brown, but equally deserving of the accolade is Lena Horne, who died today at age 92.

Her dazzling number of careers -- movie star, cabaret headliner, hit recording artist, Broadway performer -- may have been essentially a quest for an enlightened segment of American show business. And while other black multi-talented artists facing similar challenges -- Eartha Kitt and Jo Baker -- nurtured their careers via the much maturer sensibilities of Europe, Lena stayed home and managed with the America that she had been given.

Hollywood was thoroughly unenlightened, notwithstanding the milestone of Lena's being the first African-American to sign a long-term contract with a major studio. Although successful at avoiding subservient roles (through deft contract negotiations), her screentime was mostly spent in "Lena Horne, as herself" roles, typically as a cabaret singer being enjoyed by the protagonists as part of some evening entertainment. She accepted a career on the celluloid periphery for an astounding number of years (1938 to 1956) while simultaneously enjoying recording contracts and cabaret gigs; indeed, it's safe to say these two careers were decidedly symbiotic, the publicity of each being of great marketing value to the other.

Broadway was more enlightened, and even in the mid-1930s there were such things as truly-integrated casts playing in the major houses of the Theater District. The famous Mansfield theater (now the Brooks Atkinson) provides one example in 1934's short-lived Dance with your Gods, a "melodrama about voodooism" (as described by the New Yorker's reviewer) that boasted a huge cast including a few famous white actors... and that also just happened to be the Broadway debut of a very young Lena Horne.

Its dismal 9-perf run is apparently attributable to its being a latecomer to what had been a successful trend in entertainments involving the "orgiastic rites of religion-bound Negroes" (again, this is according to the New Yorker's Robert Benchley). In some ways, its failure might be considered a blessing, as the show was apparently based on overworked stereotypes as cringe-worthy as Carmen Miranda's fruit-loopy massacre of South Americana.

Thus, it would be nice if we were to discover that the simultaneously opening, and decidedly more serious show, Roll, Sweet Chariot -- which attacked the topic of black-neighborhood destruction via white gentrification, decades before the "g" word achieved wide use in city-planning nomenclature -- was more successful, but that play was to be seen by only seven audiences.

It can be considered a long-delayed case of "justice served" that the same theater, the Cort, is on this very day host to Kenny Leon's stellar revival of Wilson's Fences.

- D F Sklar, 10-May-2010

___________________________
The Found Ones in this post:

Dance with your Gods, Oct 1934, Mansfield •
Roll, Sweet Chariot, Oct 1934, Cort •