The Scottsboro Boys: A Horrible Musical

The Scottsboro Boys is the final musical collaboration of Kander and Ebb, the composer/lyricist team famous for Cabaret and Chicago, about the trial and sentencing of 9 innocent black men in 1930s Alabama. It's currently playing at the Young Vic in transfer from New York, and it is stunning. If you can get a ticket, you should go. I'd just like to put a couple of thoughts straight in my head about it, while it's fresh, because I found it a distinctly unpleasant experience, and I'm not sure everyone else in the theatre did. Certainly the standing ovations suggested people felt that the finale, while moving, was also in some way rousing. I just sat back feeling pummelled and bruised. Not guilty, or angry, or uplifted, or purged. It felt like recovering from an illness. And that's not going to go on the poster, but it's the best recommendation I've given to a play in a while.

I think this must have something to do with the minstrel show aspect. To illustrate:

This is one of the opening numbers, "Everyone's a Minstrel Tonight". The whole show is a reverse minstrel act - the black actors impersonate white stereotypes, including Southern Sheriffs, floozies, Jewish lawyers, and do it with a viciousness and lack of subtlety quite shocking to modern eyes. Many of the musical numbers have them dance in the traditional minstrel cakewalk fashion, wide eyes, splayed hands and fixed grins, even as they sing about the wonder of dying by electric chair. It becomes clear by the end that the nine men have become a minstrel show for all America, a righteous personification of the evils of Jim Crow for liberal America to feel better about itself and a defiant symbol of Southern independence for the Alabamans trying to get them executed. They are just figures in blackface. In one extraordinary number, Kyle Scatliffe sings a song in his own words before translating into pidgin mintrelsy for the benefit of the court.

At this point I'd like to jump back to Cabaret, which this show for me surpasses. But the standout moment in that show was the point at which Herr Ludwig hijacks the Jewish Schultz's birthday party with a rendition of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me":

This, by the way, is an entirely invented Bavarian folk song. But it sounds genuinely Teutonic in idiom. It's also impressively catchy, and coming as it does at the end of the first act, the audience goes into the interval singing to themselves: "Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see..."

The feeling I get when humming that to myself is what Kander and Ebb revive, brutally and repeatedly, in The Scottsboro Boys. And here's the crucial difference: both the Nazi folk song and the minstrel musical number feel like relics of a bygone age of brutality. But where the Bavarian oompah band survives in some form untainted by Hitler's shadow, the minstrel show has been utterly destroyed. It exists only in the vaguest of folk memories now, a tawdry and wretched shard of a dark-mirror world now consigned to our nightmares. There is no society for the preservation of traditional minstrel techniques, no revival shows, no performances at village fêtes to keep it alive. The only way we will ever see anything like it is in a show like this, in which black men take on the role of white men. Even then, to be honest, I found it horribly offensive, but this is the point.

By showing us so directly an art-form that took as its very axiom the natural hilarity of a race, their reduction to a single punch-line, an amusing dialect and a silly walk, we are shown a truth of dehumanisation from a different angle. Any social justice-minded work must try to wrongfoot its complacent audience to show them how man abuses man in a way they hadn't thought about before. Black men being unjustly consigned to the chair, I can handle on stage - I read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was young, so I think I know what's coming. But to watch a dance routine that is simultaneously breathtaking and breathtakingly offensive to my very understanding of common humanity: that is a feeling I hadn't felt before.

When I say this will almost certainly be your only chance to see the resurrection of the minstrel show, that sounds like the worst condemnation. But you should see it. To understand what racism is, you cannot simply look at what it fears and hates and sneers. You also have to look at what it laughs at. And it will make you feel so ill, you may feel unable to stand and applaud.