Word: minstrell
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...near future or in the recent past, still refers to black people as coloreds and maintains a subtle quota system whose goal is not human equality but the appearance of social justice. The elevator bosses take their leisure at riotous banquets where the entertainment consists of humiliating minstrel shows. The civil rights movement, in Whitehead's parallel universe, either never happened or has been reversed. Either way the effect is eerie, suggesting that the path to freedom is not inevitable and never has been...
...usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn't accept everything. By the middle '50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock...
...rotund and riotous singer; in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Once billed as the "extra padded attraction," Kaye put every pound to showstopping effect as he rocked the boat--and Broadway--in the original Guys and Dolls. He played Nicely-Nicely Johnson onscreen too, as well as a banjo-playing minstrel in the frontier spoof Cat Ballou...
...bare bones may suffice. Our young hero, Nanki-Poo (Jerry B. Shuman '98), the son of the Mikado of all Japan, has fled his father's court in the face of his upcoming nuptials to Katisha (Tuesday Rupp), a ferocious elderly noblewoman. While disguised as a wandering minstrel, Nanki-Poo has met and fallen in love with the delicious Yum-Yum (Caline Yamakawa)--but their amours were frustrated by the fact that the tailor Ko-Ko (Paul D. Siemens '98), the guardian of Yum-Yum and her sisters, planned to marry the girl himself. As the play opens, Nanki...
...high level of energy. As the young romantic protagonists Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo, Yamakawa and Shuman are thoroughly engaging, projecting the strange blend of world-wisdom and innocence that make Gilbert and Sullivan's heroes so appealing--by the time he's finished his introductory song, "A Wandering Minstrel I," Shuman has won us over. Siemens's Ko-Ko is thoroughly annoying and amusing; more effective as a comedian than a singer. He's at his best when he seems to let himself go--as, for instance, when he cuts into a gleeful dance of selfish celebration during "Here...