Word: minstreling
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...heavyweight championship. By the time Joe reached Hollywood, Producer Golder had collected a dusky crew of professionals from downtown Los Angeles, planned an all-Negro story that would more or less parallel the Brown Bomber's shuffling clamber to fame. Taking on a wonderful waxworks-plus-minstrel-show quality from its principal player, Spirit of Youth will certainly not be duplicated for many a moon...
Ever since childhood trips to the U. S. acquainted him with the cakewalk and minstrel shows, German-born Choreographer Eugene von Grona has wanted to bring Harlem and the ballet together. While dancing and directing ballets at Roxy's Theatre in 1935, he explored upper Manhattan, dived into nightclubs. He found their dancers all too light, too sophisticated. "I want them black, black, all Negro," said von Grona. Samuel ("Roxy") Rothafel agreed, said "the blacker the better." Von Grona advertised, offering scholarships, and got hundreds of applications. He picked 20 of the blackest applicants and started to rehearse...
...MINSTREL BOY-L. A. G. Strong- Knopf ($3.75). The middle half of the 18th Century, in Europe, was a kind of waiting time. Artistically an awkward bridge between classicism and the fierce romantics, politically a feudal afternoon of dying magnificence, it was a Golden Age gone tinsel without anyone quite realizing the change. Good and bad, wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny seemed to have struck a permanent balance. It was a time of elaborate facades and filthy backstreets, of nearsighted perceptions and long-range emotions. If a gentleman, posting hastily through the slums, had a tear...
Most readers will find The Minstrel Boy the more balanced, more understanding account. As Author Strong points out: if Moore sought preferment wherever he could get it, consorted with the lords and ladies, whose power his poetry was attacking, that was no more than the gracefully graceless way of the times he lived in. If he ran from the battles he fomented, that was because he was a poet, not a man of action. And if his poetry "glows at no great heat," seems largely facile and sentimental now, it had a quality, incommunicable to present ears, which made...
...career before becoming a pianist). Shaw on Patti: There has not yet been witnessed a dramatic situation so tragic that Madame Patti would not get up in the middle of it to bow and smile if somebody accidentally sprung his opera hat. She is simply a marvelous Christy Minstrel, and when you have heard her sing Within a Mile in the Albert Hall, so perfectly that not a syllable or whisper of it is lost, you have heard the best...