The verve and abandon of their fast and furious dancing made white versions look tame. But, as a vision of 1921 for 2016, it works.

It’s performing an old-school step with a new-school style—or maybe you take a step from today and execute it in a style from the past.”. Its “making of” story requires four male leads: the composers, lyricists and comedians who created the original “Shuffle Along,” one of the first black musicals on Broadway.

On the surface, Shuffle Along would seem to be of a piece with those shows, though Wolfe says, “There’s an exuberance to them, but it’s like an exuberant child playing with an Uzi. With Eubie Blake’s score—a spirited mix of ragtime and jazz—it was also the first musical to bring homegrown syncopation to an art form still caught in the waltz time of European operetta. Then they hit the road playing one-night stands in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and throughout Pennsylvania, sharing beds in fleabag rooms and hocking their personal possessions to pay their train fare. Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed NYT Critic's Pick Broadway, Musical Open Run Music Box Theater, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200 “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” recently made a disappointing announcement: Because Audra McDonald, this Broadway musical’s biggest star, is pregnant, she will soon leave the cast.

The first act ends with the show’s triumphant opening night, and in the second act we see the aftermath of success, complete with professional ruptures, personal unhappiness, and, over the decades, a relegation of Shuffle Along to the status of footnote to history. That’s the reason I signed on before there was even a complete script—I want to be a part of telling that story.

At one wry and telling point, the producers of "Shuffle Along" dryly suggest that what makes Broadway, Broadway, in the public's mind, even when you are working on 63rd Street, is perfectly simple. In the second act, when the creative team has split into two rival shows, Mr. Glover stages an ensemble challenge dance.

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This holds water.

During a run-through of an Election Day parade from the show within the show, the 61-year-old director leaps up and announces, “It’s got to be chaotic and shit,” and then breaks into a mildly demented cakewalk, flinging his arms wildly. With Shuffle Along, I wanted to live inside that open heart.”, Sittings Editor: Phyllis PosnickWigs: Mia Neal; Makeup: Francelle; Costumes: Ann Roth; Makeup design: Natalie YoungPhotographed at Greenpoint Loft, Brooklyn. “When you’re poor and you’re struggling and you’re trying to stake your claim, a kind of naïveté is essential,” Wolfe says. It liberated American music.”.

African American musicals were not new to Broadway in 1921, for Bert Williams and George Walker helped bring the all-black musical to Broadway in 1903, with In Dahomey.Despite what seemed like a prominent beginning, African American artists had difficult time staying on Broadway. But they are also eager to shine a light on this neglected corner of musical theater—and African-American—history.

It samples freely from “all that followed,” all that Mr. Glover inherited from older performers.

An argument could be made that its passionately inhabited central characters, including McDonald's Lottie Gee (Broadway's first African-American ingenue), needed more development, and there is, for sure, a dramaturgical stutter when "Shuffle Along" shifts quite suddenly from being all about the making of the musical sensation of 1921 to offering an initially stuttering coda revealing the fates of those involved.

Mr. Glover didn’t have a choice: The 1921 choreography is as forgotten as its choreographer, Lawrence Deas.

You’re black people, and you’re voting.

In the era of Hamilton, and during a season that includes a variety of other racially diverse shows on Broadway, it can be hard to imagine how revolutionary Shuffle Along was in its day. It is the show's calling card, entry point and, although it may not at first seem so, its most radical gesture. "Shuffle Along" plays at The Music Box theater, 239 W. 45th St., New York; call 212-239-6200 or visit shufflealongbroadway.com. The choreography is the work of Savion Glover, a genius of a dancer whose formative years were spent doing bravura solo work, fueled with narrative and the aggressive competition that you often see in tappers on the street. 3RD CITIZEN.

The emotional range of the dancing in “Shuffle Along” is also narrower. You’ll have to head to Milwaukee, Second stimulus check updates: House Democrats pass partisan $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill as talks on smaller measure drag on, Trump and first lady test positive for COVID-19 as US plunges deeper into uncertainty before election, Trump joins growing list of world leaders infected with COVID-19. See more.

None of these fine performers, though, are great dancers, much less in the hall-of-fame ranks of Mr. Glover and Mr. Hines, who died in 2003. 3RD CITIZEN. Brandon Victor Dixon, left, and Audra McDonald in “Shuffle Along.”, Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, recently made a disappointing announcement, Ben Brantley calls “Shuffle Along” “one of the season’s essential tickets”.

"Shuffle Along," the final new Broadway musical of the 2015-16 season has achieved all of this.

In 1921.”.

But he’s also a bridge to the future.”. As their feet tap propulsive train rhythms, their bodies convey cramped discomfort, the determination and the arduous journey.

Most innovatively, it served as metaphor, expressing the productions’ ideas about African-American history with greater eloquence, subtlety and direct appeal than their sometimes tendentious scripts. 1ST CITIZEN. Throughout the workshop process, Wolfe imbued his team with a sense of history to help them bring the period to life. In rehearsals, Wolfe provides a voluble, live-wire counterpoint to Glover’s laconic, laid-back vibe.

Its momentum is persuasive.

It’s a way of honoring our ancestors.”, “When I stepped onstage and spoke the line ‘The ghost of everyone who’s come before, who’s ever sung a note or danced a routine, you can feel it,’ this shudder went through my body,” Porter recalls. Midnight shows were added on Wednesday to allow fellow performers in shows of their own, including actress and Ziegfeld Follies legend Fanny Brice, to see it, and it helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Florence Mills, who joined the cast midway through its run.

Critics said the same in 1921. What has and has not been gained, and what prices have been paid by whom, remains a tad woolly.

The man widely considered the greatest tap dancer alive, our generation’s Fred Astaire, is demonstrating a combination of percussive steps in a tricky syncopated rhythm for a group of young African-American dancers. There has been debate about whether this is a musical revival or a new musical. There’s no dance equivalent of the tour-de-force emotional breakdown solos sung by Ms. McDonald and Billy Porter. That, in fact, is a pretty good description of Wolfe’s aim with Shuffle—to reach into the past and bring back to life the ebullient spirit of a groundbreaking hit musical.

The occasion is a dance workshop for the highly anticipated, Broadway-bound musical Shuffle Along—which, among other things, marks the professional reunion, after 20 years, of …

It was the first to include a romantic duet, “Love Will Find a Way,” between a black man and woman, and it spawned a hit, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” that would go on to become Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign song.

In this piece he takes all of the original shuffling along and re-energizes it.

Some dancers from “Shuffle Along” learn and practice routines staged and choreographed by Glover. One morning, he took everyone to the Museum of Modern Art for a special screening of Lime Kiln Club Field Day—an unfinished and long-lost 1913 silent film starring the legendary comedian Bert Williams and an all-black cast—and a discussion afterward about, among other things, the meaning of blackface and the debt of this generation to black performers of the past.

SAM PECK. When performers like Gee (McDonald, working hard to honor but not overwhelm her groundbreaking predecessor) and Gertrude Saunders/Florence Mills (both played by the emotionally resonant Adrienne Warren) argue with the producers and creators — F. E. Miller (the paternalistic Mitchell), Aubrey Lyles (the wound-tight and moving Porter), Noble Sissle (Henry) and Eubie Blake (Dixon) — the issues are not unique to this enterprise, even though "Shuffle Along" was, inarguably, a revue created by vaudeville stars and victims that improved the lot of black performers on Broadway, not least by including love songs and specialty numbers rooted in actual experience.

... “Shuffle Along,” STEVE JENKINS. Self-evidently, it is both.

As a choreographer, Glover works by improvisation and by showing more than telling. This is one way that the new “Shuffle Along” is true to the original. And you could further argue that this is hardly the first show to look behind the music, or under the footlights. But tucked inside that bulletin was some potentially compensatory news: Savion Glover, the show’s Tony-nominated choreographer, will step in. The chorus exits.)

Subtitled “The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and with a sensational cast led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Joshua Henry, it takes us behind the scenes of an epochal all-black production to show its improbable journey to Broadway.

Its chorus is as bursting with pep as the 1921 version was said to be.

That’s one way it differs from Mr. Wolfe’s 1992 musical, “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which starred the tap master Gregory Hines (with a plum part for the young Mr. Glover), and Mr. Wolfe’s 1996 production, “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” which starred Mr. Glover (whose choreography won a Tony that year). NEW YORK — It is no mean feat to revive an archaic but seminal Broadway musical — in this case, the all-black musical comedy "Shuffle Along" of 1921 — and create an entertainment that not only celebrates the classic song-and-dance material but ennobles it further by showcasing the royal talents of Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon and Joshua Henry, thus vaulting it to new heights. © 2020 Condé Nast.