Word: minstrell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...classical minstrel show consisted of three parts. In the First Part, the flashy company of "coons" marched to their seats in a large semicircle on the stage. In the center the Interlocutor, in a resplendent tail coat, pronounced the inaugural "Gentlemen, be seated...
Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall last week honored a great anniversary in show business. One hundred years ago the Virginia Minstrels, at the Bowery Amphitheatre, introduced Manhattan to a new art form, conceived in blackface and dedicated to the proposition that the white man could equal Negro comedy, song and dance. The Music Hall's directors strewed its stage with comedians and buck & wing dancers, got themselves a towering interlocutor in a yellow satin dress suit, and put on a 38-minute minstrel show of huge, streamlined proportions...
...minstrel shows that Neil O'Brien remembers had a lyrically warm, intimate, unregimented spirit that was missing at the Music Hall. The blackface tradition, in one form or another, dates from the colonial days when whites first saw and imitated Negro entertainers. As early as 1769, during a Manhattan performance of Isaac Bickerstaff's comic opera The Padlock, an actor named Lewis Hallam got drunk on the stage in his role of a Negro slave and brought the house down. This eventually led to "the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band entitled the Virginia Minstrels...
Dixie (Paramount) is a dull, none-too-faithful account of the career of Dan Emmett, author of Dixie, and one of the four Original Virginia Minstrels of 1843. Even the personality of Bing Crosby as Emmett, plus the great historic theme song, plus Technicolor, cannot enliven the picture's turgid progress through three conflagrations, too many minstrel shows leading to fame & fortune in New Orleans. When Crosby sings, fans will not be critical. But much of the time he is engaged in crude, unconvincing romances with Marjorie Reynolds and Dorothy Lamour. And most of the time the minstrelsy...
...Could Whistle. When the Navy closed down Storyville (New Orleans' red-light district) during World War I, Bunk Johnson left his band and toured with circuses and minstrel shows. As the years went by and the demand for New Orleans jazz died away, Bunk took other kinds of work to support his growing family. In 1933 he lost all his teeth and could not play any more even if he wanted to. "And besides," says he, "I loan my cornet to a man and he never come back." Bunk tried trucking, at $1.50 a day. He found...