WRTI.org: The 1920s Musical Hit SHUFFLE ALONG — Now on Broadway and Re-Imagined — Has Philly Roots [D.P. Stearns of The Inquirer: launched E. Blake, J. Baker, W.G. Still]

Adrienne Warren and company perform "I'm Just Wild About Harry" in 'Shuffle Along or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.' (Julieta Cervantes)

WRTI

By David Patrick Stearns

May 23, 2016

Philadelphia has long been known as a theater tryout town, but one show that many have forgotten is the first mainstream African American hit Shuffle Along. Now, a documentary revision of the 1921 jazz musical is back and is a big Broadway hit.  The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns examines its local roots.

"The show launched songwriter Eubie Blake and gave career starts to Josephine Baker and William Grant Still."

David Patrick Stearns: Sitting in the Shuffle Along audience at Broadway's Music Box Theater, I kept seeing Philadelphia locales popping up, though places I'd never heard of, like the Dunbar Theater at Broad and Lombard streets. Where are they now? Goodness knows, Philadelphia doesn't tear down buildings so much as it waits for them to collapse. But the Dunbar?

Jack McCarthy: It's now a parking lot and it's the parking lot to the city health building.

DPS: That's Jack McCarthy, the Philadelphia archivist and music historian recounting a lost world, a remarkable African American enclave grouped around Broad and South streets that showed how Shuffle Along hardly rose from a vacuum.

JM: There were, in that little stretch of five or six blocks, three major theaters catering to black audiences at that time in the '20s. So, Philadelphia at that time has this enormous and growing and diverse black culture.

DPS: The audience was African American workers who had migrated from the south around World War I, those who had been in Philadelphia for generations, and even white people.