Word: jolson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...JOLSON: THE MUSICAL This tribute to the Mammy singer was a hit in London. Mike Burstyn stars in the U.S. tour, beginning next month in Cleveland, Ohio...
...Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, becomes the first "talking" movie...
...Jazz Singer, after Al Jolson says, "You ain't heard nothin' yet," he doesn't burst into speech. He sings Toot Toot Tootsie. In the dawn of sound, talking pictures were often singing ones. Hollywood released 55 musicals in 1929, an amazing 78 in 1930. And these were just the feature films. To pad the program, studios made shorts (typically 10 minutes) in which stars from Broadway, radio and nightclubs performed and, as best they could, acted in a dramatic setting. Back then these films--the equivalent of short stories, but with songs--were fillers. Today they're thrillers, precious...
...spout ("I run until I's black in de face," says a man fleeing a Latin American revolt in the 1931 Be Like Me). He was not alone in caricaturing African Americans. Crosby, whose crooner inflections owed much to black musicians, wears blackface in the 1932 Dream House--as Jolson did in The Jazz Singer...
...spot with hair-colored paint. No problem, until half an hour into the post-Oscar party, by which time the star of the evening had absently patted his head a few times, then stroked his face. "My wife Kate rushed over," he recalls, "and said, 'You look like Al Jolson!' I was mortified. I was also relieved that I hadn't rubbed my head during the ceremony and, in front of God and a billion people, given my thanks in blackface...