EXCERPT p.47-48 Through metacommentary on the original production and the biographical explication of its key players, Wolfe’s Shuffle Along . . . and All That Followed aimed to reclaim the lost time of neglected history. It invited audiences to parse the historical record while taking in Jazz Age razzle dazzle. The production disrupted typical temporal relationships that assume a static past, educating audiences by activating the transporting energies of tap choreography, fostering intergenerational knowledge transmission among the cast, and addressing Broadway as a majoritarian institution. The show was an act of writing history in order to redress neglect, a way of celebrating and explaining the significance of the original Shuffle Along to the Broadway community, audiences and performers alike. The 2016 reimagining/reinvention was propelled by the combustible energy of Savion Glover’s tap choreography and featured Broadway’s most lauded African American performers from three generations, including six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. In the epigraph, McDonald presses Wolfe for dramaturgical spatiotemporal specificity in her effort to understand Wolfe’s framing device of historical characters directly addressing the audience about their careers and, eventually, deaths. McDonald’s inquiry highlights Wolfe’s use of time as a dramaturgical tool. In his libretto, Wolfe’s atemporal framing device contrasts with the otherwise linear narrative of Shuffle Along and the lives of its creators and performers. The different temporal logics of the frame and the main story create a metatemporal libretto that brings, as Brian Richardson defines dramatic metatemporality, “incompatible time schemes into collision.”4 This collision created tension for McDonald as a performer attempting to ground her process. In place of the spatiotemporal specificity McDonald sought, Wolfe’s reply declared a reclamation of the Broadway stage via the return of “real people,” revealing a transtemporal logic to the live performance in which the characters of the show exist across or through time by intermingling their historical moment with the immediacy of stage time.5 This transtemporality occurs via the living presence of the actors. That is, McDonald and her fellow performers mediated temporal tension (or incompatibility, per Richardson) via their bodies as they spoke, sang, and tapped to syncopated rhythms. The “we” of Wolfe’s response underscores the political imperative of reclaiming and reframing the popular commercial stage to manifest a mostly forgotten Jazz Age musical comedy created by an all-black creative team during the Jim Crow era.
LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, comdie ballet de Moliere sur une musique de Lully, mise en scene de Denis Podalydes. Photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)
Christopher Plummer as Propsero and Julyana Soelistyo as Ariel in The Tempest. Photography by David Hou.
Oklahoma! Broadway set desgin by Laura Jellinek