55. THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS (2010)

In 2004 Broadway’s longest ongoing composer-lyricist collaboration came to an end when Fred Ebb of Kander and Ebb fame passed away at age seventy-six.  At the time of his death, he and composer John Kander were working on two other musicals. Curtains was a backstage murder mystery.  It made it to Broadway in 2007 and ran for over a year.  The other show they were working on was The Scottsboro Boys, which arrived on Broadway in 2010 (a third show, The Visit was posthumously produced on Broadway but had originally been presented in Chicago during Ebb’s lifetime).

The Scottsboro Boys dealt with a shameful chapter in American history when a pair of white prostitutes, riding on a train to Memphis, accuse a group of nine black men of rape in order to avoid arrest.  Soon these nine young men (one of whom is a mere adolescent) are sent to jail and find themselves trapped in a racist legal system and potentially facing the death penalty.

Ingeniously Kander, Ebb, librettist David Thompson and director-choreographer Susan Stroman, their collaborators on Steel Pier, decided not to tell the story in a straightforward manner but rather as a minstrel show, thus harkening back to their twin masterworks Cabaret and Chicago by using show business as a metaphor.  Significantly the nine black actors played every roll, even the two white women (this was all part of the minstrel tradition) with two exceptions.  The white “Interlocutor” who serves as the shows emcee and played by John Cullum, and a mysterious woman holding a cake box whose identity won’t be revealed until the end of the show.

The Scottsboro Boys premiered at the Vineyard Theater Off-Broadway and then played at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where it received rave reviews both times.  With that it moved to the Lyceum Theater where it again was critically acclaimed but had trouble selling tickets.  The simple fact was that this was a harrowing story and the decision to tell it in the style of a notoriously archaic musical genre made it that much harder for people to deal with.  The Scottsboro Boys only ran for forty-nine performances.  The show has enjoyed a life in regional theaters and enjoyed a sold out run at the Young Vic in London, followed by a limited engagement at the Garrick Theater.  Though they wrote their share of musical comedies like Woman of the Year and Curtains, Kander and Ebb were always at their best when challenging their audience.  The Scottsboro Boys  maybe their most challenging work and also one of their best.