All tagged Cabin in the Sky
Musicals about the black experience were not unheard of in the early years of the Golden Age of Broadway, despite a society that didn’t exactly embrace black culture. Shows like Porgy & Bess (1935), Carmen Jones (1943), St. Louis Woman (1946) and Lost in the Stars (1949) told compelling stories about this underrepresented faction of the population. What was harder to come by were musicals about black characters that delved into the world of fantasy and folklore. There was, however, the 1940 musical Cabin in the Sky which gave us both a serious story about people of color that also delved into their cultural heritage and folklore while employing a touch of fantasy.
New York City Center Encores! celebrates the rarely heard works of America’s most important composers and lyricists. Conceived in 1994 as concert performances, Encores! gives three glorious scores the chance to be heard as their creators originally intended.” This is directly quoted from the City Center website as the explanation and purpose of the Encores! series. It’s a worthy mission and goal, and one most of us would embrace. Their most recent concert of Vernon Duke and John Latouche’s Cabin in the Sky is an excellent example of a show richly deserving of this treatment. It was also an electrifying production of a show that will most likely never receive a full-scale production after again. Amazing music combined with a dated, mediocre book, and Cabin in the Sky was the right fit for the criteria of “rarely heard works.”
In recent weeks I have made the argument on this blog for revisiting older and perhaps forgotten musicals. There is still gold to be mined from these wonders of yesteryear and that is why I was so excited, after years of reading about them, to finally witness my first staged concert of a forgotten musical at New York City Center’s Encores! series. As a theatre historian who has just moved to the Big Apple, there is no better way to experience the 1940 musical Cabin in the Sky, a most deserving choice of their attention. Vernon Duke's and John Latouche's vibrant, jazz-infused score lives and breathes again reminding us that, just because a musical has been gone for half-a-century (and change), that it need not be forgotten.
