Shaw Festival
Through October 11
COTTON CLUB Spiegeltent/Shaw Festival
By Augustine Warner
The venue is fascinating, a Harlem night club with all Black performers, all White customers and Mob ownership.
That was the Cotton Club.
Outside, it was the poverty of the Great Depression and the intellectual fervor of the Harlem Renaissance.
The night club showcased Black performers who really weren’t allowed to perform Downtown, in the Jim Crow entertainment environment of 1936, featured in “Cotton Club,” in the Shaw Festival’s Spiegeltent.
It’s a revue, music from the Great American Songbook, performed by a small and very strong cast, in a far different racial environment.
There isn’t a set or elaborate costumes, just singing and some tap dancing from Graeme Kitigawa (who also drums).
Where it gets interesting is the source of the material.
It came out of the ethnic and racial soup which was New York City in the early years of the last century, source of the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, the rhythms of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, the amazing dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (occasionally allowed on a Hollywood screen…at least, outside of the South) and the entertainment of Fats Waller.
Most people have heard the numbers, up to the present day,
“My Man” was the theme for Fanny Brice and a key song when Barbra Streisand, as Brice, did “Funny Girl.”
She was alone on a Broadway stage on a Saturday night long ago.
Here, it’s a wonderful Ėlodie Gillett in the Spiegeltent.
“Cotton Club” has very few stage parents, listing only director Kimberly Rampersad and festival music director Paul Sportelli.
In the pattern of a revue, performers twist and wend in the venue, one performer here, two performers there and sometimes all of them, all five.
They make use of the small stage and the series of walkways into the center and sometimes just the circumferential walkway of the theater.
The company opens with “I Got Rhythm” and closes with “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” the Gershwins and Ellington, eternal music.
Kitigawa taps through Ellington and Bob Russell’s paean to the passage of time, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” while Tat Austrie reminds us of what a summer this has been, with Buffalonian Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s lament “Stormy Weather” and George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s classic “Summertime” and Alana Bridgewater reminded the club audiences, then, and today’s audiences with Lewis Allen’s look at lynching “Strange Fruit.”
Jeremiah Sparks is there to juice things up, with “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” from Waller, Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf and Joe Richards and Redd Evans’ “Frim Fram Sauce.”
I imagine those long ago club audiences knew good stuff, Uptown or Downtown, and the Cotton Club provided that to the comfortable (financially comfortable) people in the seats, even when some of that material might be a little uncomfortable.
Even today, “Cotton Club” does the same thing and that’s why it’s worth being there.
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