BY SCOTT BROWN, New York Magazine Sometimes, there’s nothing more dangerous than a little old-fashioned entertainment—and entertainment doesn’t come much more old-fashioned than the minstrel show, American theater’s most peculiar institution. In their final collaboration, The Scottsboro Boys, John Kander and the late Fred Ebb make a risky wager: using minstrelsy to tell a foundational parable of the civil-rights movement. The titular Boys were nine black youths falsely accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama—then falsely convicted, over and over again. It’s a story of brazen injustice, and the show’s theatrical provocations are proportionately broad and basic. “Everyone’s a minstrel tonigh
BY JEREMY GERARD, Bloomberg News When a slinky prostitute recants the testimony that has helped send nine innocent young black men to jail, the Dixie prosecutor hardly skips a beat. He breaks into “Financial Advice,” a smarmy ode on the power of “Jew money” to explain his star witness’s sudden change of heart. A guilty verdict affirms the wisdom of his tactical shift. So goes “The Scottsboro Boys” the valedictory musical of John Kander and Fred Ebb(who died in 2004), the refreshingly twisted team responsible for such no silver-lining, anti-smiley- face Broadway shows as “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” Unveiled last spring in a smashing production overseen by director-choreographer Susan Stroman, “
The Chicago Tribune A few minutes into the last musical bearing the names of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, just as the shrewdly appropriated but pervasively ignoble Anglo-American tradition of the minstrel show is becoming almost unbearable to watch, one of the Scottsboro Boys starts to sing of his loneliness. As sung by the deeply resonant Joshua Henry, playing a real-life character who died in an Alabama jail, always professing his innocence of trumped-up rape charges, Kander and Ebb’s simple melody to “Go Back Home” also is almost unbearable. Almost unbearably beautiful. Right from the first plaintive chord. And from that critical turn on, “The Scottsboro Boys” starts to do what al
