"It began in a conversation with John and Fred and Stro," started librettist David Thompson, explaining how a minstrel show came to be the highly unusual framing device of the new Off-Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys.
John, Fred and Stro are, of course, his collaborators: composer-lyricist John Kander, the late lyricist Fred Ebb and director-choreographer Susan Stroman. "And I think it was actually Fred who came up with the idea. You always start with what's the best way to tell the story. If it was 1931," — the year the musical takes place, the year the real events on which the show is based occurred — "what way would the Scottsboro boys tell the story, the only way to tell it? And the minstrel show idea came up."
Minstrel shows would have been as familiar to the Scottsboro Boys — nine teenagers who, in Jim Crow-era Alabama, were unjustly accused of raping two white women, and thrown in jail — as reality shows are to teens today. For roughly a century, from slightly before The Civil War to around the 1920s, minstrel shows ranked as mainstream entertainment, and their stock characters, like Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, and signature acts, such as the cakewalk, were widely recognized. "For a very long time it was an American form of entertainment," said Thompson. "It's where all the popular music came from."
Minstrel shows began around the 1840s. A collection of sentimental songs, dances and comic sketches, they purported to be a depiction of black life in the South. The earliest shows were performed by northern whites, who donned blackface and executed outsized stereotypes of African-Americans. As the form solidified, certain steady characters emerged. These included the Interlocutor, a very correct, white-faced master of ceremonies, and his "end men" Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, foolish sidekicks in blackface who would engage in wordplay and banter with the Interlocutor, and take on various comic personae during the show.
After the Civil War, minstrel shows became more lavish, with larger casts, sets and showy costumes. More critically, they began to be performed by black people, who adopted the same stereotypes and cliches established by their white predecessors. The wide and lasting impact of minstrel performing styles can be seen in such major 20th-century performers as Bert Williams, Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson, as well as movie musicals like "Swing Time" with Fred Astaire and "Holiday Inn" with Astaire and Bing Crosby, which featured then-acceptable musical numbers performed in blackface. Minstrel shows were also very popular in England. And minstrel-derived expressions like "That Takes the Cake" and calling an easy task a "cakewalk" remain part of the everyday lexicon.
For Thompson, the free-for-all-like atmosphere of a minstrel show seemed a fitting backdrop for the media and legal circuses that surrounded the real Scottboro boys. "There was something about the events around the trial," he said. "There were all these crazy things surrounding the trial. This is the filter that their truth would have to go through to reach the public."
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