The Scottsboro Boys Broadway Reviews

On the surface, 'The Scottsboro Boys' is a hard sell in a Times Square dominated by escapist fluff. The show was slightly tweaked after its off-Broadway run in the spring -- to give the characters more back story and motivation -- but it hasn't been compromised, and remains grimly thought-provoking. Yet this is also a thrillingly inventive and entertaining night at the theater. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be moved. What could be more Broadway than that?

Susan Stroman (The Producers) has put together a talented cast that conveys the wrenching human drama while kicking up a storm in a series of jaunty, ragtime-flavored musical numbers. In the end, it's a show that leaves you disturbed, entertained and just a little bit prouder of Broadway.

But the real star of the show is the director and choreographer Susan Stroman, who here creates some of her best work. There are exaggerated, athletic shuck-n-jive movements for the minstrel numbers, an upbeat tap dance around an electric chair and a brilliant pas de deux between a boy and a projected shadow as he recalls a lynching. It's the classic Kander and Ebb twist: horrible things, presented spectacularly.

Yes, the show delivers a history lesson about America's racist past by employing an array of theatrical tropes that are frankly racist themselves (shuffle-and-jive dance steps, Stepin Fetchit comedy routines, blackface, etc.). The virtually all African American cast plays the Scottsboro defendants in a naturalistic way while employing more stylized, controversial minstrel performance methods to play the story's white characters: the slutty white women who cry rape, the racist sheriff who arrests and beats the prisoners, and the New York Jewish lawyer who swoops in to defend them in court. As intentionally broad as the performances often are, the actors are terrific — and the effect is to underscore both the horror of the Scottsboro case as well as the ways in which popular culture has reinforced racial stereotyping.

The cast is terrific. Any qualms about the replacement of the actor who played main defendant Haywood Patterson at the Vineyard are dispelled early on by Joshua Henry (from last season's 'American Idiot'). Henry is very good here; so is 80-year-old veteran John Cullum, who struts through the affair as the Interlocutor with a benevolent smile tinged with snarling condescension. (Cullum might have remembered some of the trial as a child growing up in the South during the six years of Scottsboro trials.)

The unerring expertise in writing, staging, design and performance that makes this show so exciting is a striking reminder how musicals crafted well in the classic Broadway style remain more satisfying than the newer rocky horror likes of 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' and 'American Idiot' put together. 'The Scottsboro Boys' proves once again that the old school still rules.

This jarring mix of racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, legal injustice and physical abuse with the Old South and song-and-dance entertainment is brilliant, subversive and ultimately heartbreaking.

The story is wrenching and the songs rank with Kander and Ebb's most gorgeous; 'Southern Days' -- which starts out as a riff on 'My Old Kentucky Home' and, with its lynching imagery, ends up echoing Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' -- still gives me nightmares.

The Scottsboro Boys isn't a precision-guided social endoscopy: It's a single, stunning blow to the temple. And on its own discomfiting, blunt-force terms, it's utterly successful.

With its high-energy ensemble and dynamic direction and choreography, this darkly provocative musical makes a fitting swan song for the duo behind 'Cabaret' and 'Chicago.'

'Scottsboro Boys' isn't perfect, but it's worthwhile. It deserves credit for tackling a slice of history that needs to be known.

The show is stuffed with bravura, impassioned, individual performances that fuse into an inestimably powerful ensemble.

Here's to the creative team for insisting on delivering the show it wanted. 'The Scottsboro Boys' sets a high bar for Broadway musicals this season.

What has emerged is an absolute marvel. The creators - including director and choreographer Susan Stroman and book writer David Thompson - walk a fine line between satire and alienation, but emerge with what surely must be the edgiest play on Broadway.

Kander and Ebb's score is exceptional. If not their best, a couple of the songs ranks among my all-time favorites.

'The Scottsboro Boys' rises in pathos as the fate of the imprisoned men is revealed. Not everyone in the audience will be able to trust their teary emotion—is this another of the musical’s subversive traps?—but it’s one of the few times that the show seems to belong on Broadway.

Perhaps with a more nuanced book and flexible frame, Scottsboro would have more punch. It’s almost exactly the sort of show we need now. A whole resistance movement has grown in the past two years around no discernible cause other than horror at a black man in the White House. Can Tea Party protesters in blackface be far off?

In short, Scottsboro, which opened Sunday at the Lyceum Theatre, wears its social conscience and its political incorrectness on its sleeve. And while the result is thoughtful, vibrant entertainment, the earnestness and irreverence can seem self-conscious.

It's sharp and snappy, imaginative and heartfelt. It has a real American tragedy to tell and some of the best in the business to tell it.

But the musical never really resolves the tension between its impulse to entertain us with hoary jokes and quivering tambourines and the desire to render the harsh morals of its story with earnest insistence. The occasional portentous sound of a single bass drumbeat is like a summons from recess back to the schoolroom. 'The Scottsboro Boys' earns admiration for its stylistic daring and obvious ambition, but I'm not sure it's possible to honor the experience of the men it portrays while turning their suffering into a colorful sideshow.

The songwriters and their librettist, David Thompson, sensed this sufficiently to frame the show with one such reverberation as if that could make the facile irony of the rest—the story is told as if by a blackface minstrel troupe—permissible. This stratagem fails because the juxtaposition defuses both gestures, just as the minstrel-style heartiness defuses the historical agony. You can sometimes please people by shocking them, but trying to please them and offend them at the same time achieves neither.

I had no trouble imagining a play by Mr. Thompson about the Scottsboro trials that could have introduced a new generation to one of the most troubling episodes in modern American history-but I doubt that any Broadway producer would have sunk a dime into it. In its place, then, we get a musical that slathers this terrible tale in a thick coat of musical-comedy frosting that has been spiked with cheap, elephantine irony. I can't imagine a nastier-tasting recipe.