Several revues of different sorts opened in autumn, including the latest edition of Charlot’s Revue in London, and Earl Carroll’s Vanities (with Sophie Tucker), The Grab Bag (with Ed Wynn) and Dixie to Broadway (with Florence Mills) in New York. Productions of Countess Maritza opened in Europe, including in Budapest, and a new musical starring Dorothy Dickson, Patricia, debuted in London.

After a contextual overview of events in 1924, the legacy of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (starring Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles) on other Black musicals, including Runnin’ Wild, featuring Adelaide Hall and Elisabeth Welch, and Dinah, in which Gertrude Saunders introduced the Black Bottom dance, is discussed. Next is an introduction to the revue genre, with examples including Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1923, the Shubert’s Artists and Models and Charlot’s London Calling!, all of which played into 1924.

Samuel O’Connell reads a single case study, Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Broadway musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Beginning with an overview of the relevant critical writings related to whether Black music can reflect cultural and racial experiences, O’Connell contends that the genre of soul music, which Van Peebles incorporates within his stage play, succeeds in capturing the rhythm and politics of late 1960s and early 1970s Harlem. A theatrical innovator, Van Peebles challenged the accepted format of the integrated musical, a musical with a unified (and thematically related) book and music, and pioneered a new type of Black musical form, the fragmented musical, which was better equipped to reflect the racial and political frictions that were occurring in the midst of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements.