African-American musical theater

[citation needed] Before the late 1890s, the image portrayed of African Americans on Broadway was a "secondhand vision of black life created by European-American performers."

[2] Another pioneering Black touring group was Sherman H. Dudley's Smart Set Company, whose musical comedies in the early 1900s bridged the gap between old Minstrel-style stereotypes and more upscale, authentic and self-referential humour.

Cook's Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk, an hour-long sketch that was the first all-black show to play in a prestigious Broadway house, Casino Theatre's Roof Garden.

[citation needed] Williams and Walker were dropped from "Isham's Octoroons", one of the first African American companies to break from the minstrel style performance.

[5] They then put together a number of small productions including A Lucky Coon, Sons of Ham, and The Policy Players, but their ultimate goal was to produce and star in their own Broadway musical.

So they thought back to the times in San Francisco and produced In Dahomey (1903) alongside Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jesse A. Shipp, and Will Marion Cook.

Will Marion Cook and the Johnson brothers, James and J. Rosamond, had pursued new careers and Bert Williams moved to the Ziegfeld Follies and black musical theater went into a hiatus.

"[8] F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who wrote the book for Shuffle Along (1921) had met in 1906, and began performing at the "Pekin Theater Stock Company" near Chicago from 1906 to 1909, along with other African American stars such as Harry Lawrence Freeman.

These short films are a record of music similar to the work these four men were doing on stage at the time...[citation needed] Rang Tang premiered July 12, 1927, on Broadway at the Royale Theater and ran for 119 performances, including a 14-week overrun, finishing at the Majestic October 24, 1927.

The series were named after Florence Mills theme song, "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird," a thinly veiled protest against racial injustice, which she first sung in the Dixie to Broadway show in 1924.

[10][11] The Blackbirds of 1928, featured such talents as singers Adelaide Hall and Aida Ward, dancer extraordinaire Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and top-flight funnyman Tim Moore.

Further Blackbirds revues were staged in 1930 with Ethel Waters, Buck and Bubbles, and Flournoy Miller, in 1933 with Edith Wilson, and in 1939 with Lena Horne and Tim Moore.

[citation needed] Michael R. Jackson's A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020, becoming the first African American musical to win this award.