The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show
We tend to think of 19th-century minstrel shows as white actors wearing blackface and acting out reconstruction-era stereotypes of “darky life on the Old Plantation,” in the words of one old playbill. But by the 1870s, as Allen Woll notes in his book Black Musical Theatre, troupes of self-proclaimed “real and original” African American entertainers were competing with white companies. The 1890 census listed 1,490 black professional actors, and most of them were employed by minstrel shows.
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This paradox–black actors imitating white impersonations of blacks–makes an intriguing premise for Carlyle Brown’s The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, about an all-black minstrel troupe and their white manager a century ago. Like August Wilson in Seven Guitars and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Brown seeks to dramatize African American life by interweaving a tragic plot with extended passages of story telling; but Brown’s writing falls short of the rich poetic and historical textures Wilson brings to his scripts. Still, the real-life horror of racist violence Brown depicts gives his play moral urgency. And the minstrel-show elements–especially the visual metaphor of blacks in clownish blackface, representing the extreme psychological disorientation suffered by men forced to play the fool in order to survive–are effectively handled by director Douglas Alan-Mann and his well-chosen cast.
Conceived by director Michael Bennett and written by composer Henry Krieger and librettist Tom Eyen (who drew on material improvised during workshops with the original cast), Dreamgirls is a savvy mix of show-biz soap opera and sociological tract. Obviously if unofficially inspired by the career of Diana Ross and the Supremes, it charts the upward climb of three teenagers from a Chicago housing project to soul-music stardom under the guidance of car-salesman-turned-producer Curtis Taylor, who dreams of making black music a dominant force in the record business. His strategy is to make R & B less “Rough & Black”–slicker, smoother, brighter, whiter. His methods also include DJ payola (to push his own records and kill his rivals’) and sexual manipulation: he seduces temperamental lead singer Effie Melody White, then ditches her for the prettier, more pliable backup vocalist Deena Jones (don’t call her Miss Ross), whom he reshapes into the Dreams’ front woman and finally a star on her own.
