JUMP FOR JOY
Until now. Half a century later the show that was, the show that was meant to be, and the show that might be today combine in this Jump for Joy. Many of the old songs have been rescued from oblivion by Ellington experts Andrew Homzy and Bill Berry, who laboriously restored the original orchestrations from Ellington’s lead sheets (stored at the Smithsonian Institution), and by Richard Wang, a University of Illinois music professor who served as music consultant. The scholars also drew on the recollections of Ellington’s colleagues as well as Ellington’s scrawled notes and an audiotape of the scotched 1958 version.
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For better and for worse, the man most critical to this Lazarus act has been Kuller, one of two lyricists for the original production; Ellington collaborated with the white lyricist and screenwriter until Ellington’s death, in 1974. Now 80, Kuller has shaped the Pegasus revival, drawing on his evergreen memory as well as notes left by cocomposer Hal Borne (who now suffers from Alzheimer’s).
Less successful is “You Got to Be an Israelite to Sing a Mammy Song,” a takeoff on Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor’s wailing minstrel songs in blackface. In this number, which wasn’t even in the 1941 version, a black janitor (a marvelously deadpanning Cliff Frazier) plaintively asks a director if he can sing a “mammy song”; after all, he’s from the South, has a mammy, and has paid his dues. But “Irving Cohen,” “Sammy Schwartz,” and “Sol Levine” (all slyly played by Aaron Stover) get the nod. The idea is cute but would have been dated even in 1941–not even Stepin Fetchit would have wanted to earn a living then going down on one knee and singing “Swanee” to white folks. (Interestingly, its target could as easily have been Chicago’s phony “minority” businesses.)
No matter how persuasive Ellington’s well-wrought melodies, the new lyrics consign the songs to oblivion. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Condo Now” (tell that to Cabrini-Green!) Kuller has the temerity to suggest that blacks today–symbolized by a 1991 Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima–have got it made, and can even vote Republican! We’re told that “Uncle Tom’s cabin will be the White House!” (Pandering can go no further.)
Over the last half-century both aesthetic sophistication and social expectations have grown. Pathetically out of touch, Jump for Joy’s new but unimproved songs are typical of the spinelessness of today’s pop culture, where a “revolution in panty hose” is easily confused with the real thing. What’s the point of updating a show that winds up less relevant to contemporary concerns than the original show was to its era?
