Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Valentino & Brando. Harry Belafonte's background is an arresting mixture of black and white ancestry, of Harlem harshness and the West Indian languor, of Broadway jazz caves, Greenwich Village hash houses, efficient modern recording studios. Throughout he has clung to a certain tough quality that can flash out as easily as his boyish smile. Recently TV Director Don Medford tried to define the key to Belafonte's dramatic magnetism: "Behind him is this hard core of hostility. Like Brando, Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, he's loaded with it." The quality lends a demon drive to Belafonte...
Jobs in the theater were hard to come by when Harry Belafonte left dramatic school in 1948. He took a job as a messenger and package wrapper in the garment district; nights he used to drop in at a Broadway jazz cellar known as the Royal Roost. He learned a few songs-Star Dust, Blue Moon, Pennies from Heaven-and landed a job. He made some recordings, even composed a quavering ballad titled Lean on Me ("You in your high ivory tower/ Drunk with the sense of your power/ I adore you/ Do I bore you? Come, come...
...accepted Millard and me. He had his shirt and I had mine." Marguerite Belafonte remembers the chain-"the Vanguard, the Blue Angel, the Black Orchid in Chicago, the Chase Hotel in St. Louis-and straight to the sky." Belafonte got parts in John Murray Anderson's Almanac on Broadway and in the movie Carmen Jones. Then one RCA Victor album-Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean-transformed Belafonte from a nightclub headliner into an international show-business celebrity...
...following the letter of the law, would not allow him to present on the stage either the Holy Family (Bethlehem) or a recent monarch (prodded by Edward VIII, censorship was finally lifted). In the U.S. there were no objections. Victoria Regina, starring Helen Hayes, ran for 604 performances on Broadway...
...Broadway...