Swingin’ the Dream that Didn’t Come True

On April 23rd – William Shakespeare’s date of birth and death- school kids and the bookworm adults among us celebrated World Book Day. But why am I talking about this in a Swing blog? Well, a few days later, I discovered that in 1939, Shakespeare met Swing in an epic Broadway show called Swingin’ the Dream. It was an innovative adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a cast of some of the brightest black stars of the time: Louis Armstrong played the role of Bottom; Butterfly McQueen and Oscar Polk, fresh from the set of Gone With the Wind, played Puck and Flute; the comedian; Moms Mabley was Quince; the singer Maxine Sullivan was Titania; and the future Oscar nominee Dorothy Dandridge a pixie. Twenty-four of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, as Titania’s forest animals, danced to the music of The Benny Goodman Sextet, Fats Waller and Count Basie.

Set in 1980s New Orleans, the birthplace of Swing, the story revolves around the wedding of a Louisiana governor. The two men who work for him as secretaries are in love with his cousin’s daughter. This leaves another southern belle – who loves one of the lads – out in the cold. The “plantation hands”, Carter wrote, “decide to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the wedding entertainment, and the four lovers wander into the magic woods where their love affairs are first entangled and then straightened out by the magic of Oberon, King of the Pixies. All of this forms a background for Jackie Mabley and her company of actors to stumble through the lines of a mock rehearsal of their play” (The Guardian, 2021).

This no-holes-barred production at the 3,700-seater Center Theatre on Broadway, New York, was sure to bring in a crowd. In her book Swingin’ at the Savoy, Norma Miller describes the lead-up to opening night with great enthusiasm: the star treatment they received, the plushness of the theatre, the sets (based on Walt Disney’s designs), the stars, the musical greatness of Mugsy Spaniel, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman and more. I’d love to hear Bill Bailey singing a capella with a choir. I wish I could see how the story was adapted to be relevant to the Swing-era U.S.A. I’d give anything to see Louis Armstrong as Bottom! 

But sadly, I never will because the play tanked, with no footage or recordings to resurrect it. After only 13 nights, the final show was “performed with a lot of tears and heartbreak” (Miller, 1996). As Young Vic’s artistic director,  Kwame Kwei-Armah, rather dramatically puts it, “It’s almost like a kind of murder mystery. The play was butchered by the press, and somehow the body has disappeared” (New York Times, 2021).

What went wrong? There is no footage and only fragments of the script, so the reasons for its failure will never be clear, and we only have reviews and opinions of the time to go by. According to Norma Miller, the audience reacted positively on the opening night: “We had a big number in the second act which opened with Goodman playing a number. The applause seemed to go on forever”. However, she goes on to say how they were “devastated by the reviews that came the next day, which called the show a “mishmash of Shakespeare and Swing”. 

Swing was the craze of the day, and the jazz adaptations of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Swing Mikado (1938) and The Hot Mikado (1939), both with black casts, had enjoyed success, despite debates over negative racial stereotypes. Reviews of these shows were positive, albeit rather condescending, with the usual racial slurs of the 1930s. But something didn’t hit right with Swingin’ the Dream. It didn’t even provoke cringingly racist reviews like “The performers grin and strut and begin stamping out the hot rhythms with an animal frenzy. ‘Za-zu-za-z”, as The Swing Mikado did.

It also couldn’t have been the concept of Swingin’ Shakespeare because The Boys from Syracuse, the first major Shakespeare musical based on The Comedy of Errors, was a roaring success. “Its all-white cast made effective use of swing, and the show ran for 235 performances” (The Guardian, 2021).  As James Shapiro pointed out, “The defining feature of the emerging Shakespeare musical was hybridity: mixing musical styles, mixing Shakespeare’s language with contemporary American idiom, mixing highbrow and lowbrow – and, in Swingin’ the Dream mixing races, establishing a precedent for Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story. But getting the mix right wasn’t easy” (ibid).

So, the success of these adaptations shows that a black cast would not necessarily close a show during this racially oppressive time, nor was it the incompatibility of jazz and Shakespeare. Perhaps, then, the problem was black people performing Shakespeare.  A review in the Time suggests, in no uncertain terms, that white audiences may not have been ready for a predominantly black Shakespeare production: “No self-respecting Bard-hunter would stalk such mongrel prey”. The Boston Globe simply warned, “The cast will be Negro”. 

Yet, there was an audience for the opening show, and as Norma Miller pointed out, plenty of applause for the jazz numbers. So it wasn’t necessarily the blackness of the cast that was off-putting, but perhaps the dynamics of the creators’ seemingly progressive vision that missed the mark.

For a start, the venue was all wrong. Reading Norma Miller’s memoir, it becomes clear that the most successful Lindy Hop performances were those with audience interaction, in which the performance fed upon the audience’s enthusiasm and vice versa. The shows she recalls as the best were the ones with the whoops and hollers of the crowd, their closeness and excitement. The Centre Theatre was vast and cavernous and didn’t allow the intimacy and engagement that such an art form thrives upon. According to a postmortem in Theatre Arts Monthly, “A dreadful distance separated the audience from dancers and music alike. Even the Pied Piper of Manhattan, Benny Goodman himself, could not draw his followers from the misty wastes of that huge and too elegant auditorium” (The Guardian, 2021). 

Equally, while praising the production’s “sheer mass and charge”, the review concluded that the “showmanship was not there, nor any ingenuity in direction or planning which would have made a collection of brilliant ideas a functioning whole” (ibid). It seems that director Erik Charell did not understand the essence of Swing and what made it so popular. It was improvised and vernacular; each musician and dancer brought their flavour: Norma Miller describes how each of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had their distinctive trademark move or style, even within a tightly choreographed piece, and it was understood that no dancer was to copy another. This freedom of expression can be seen clearly in dances like the Big Apple and even in Hollywood movies like Hellzapoppin’. However, according to critics of the day, Swingin’ the Dream’s black performers were not given the improvisational freedom that would have made this ambitious show a success. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier, William G Nunn faulted Charell for failing to “allow his super cast of stars to be themselves” (The Guardian, 2021).

Critics agreed that there was too much Shakespeare and not enough Swing – I guess an audience attracted by the jazz giants that the show had to offer wanted to see Jazz. They wanted to see Louis Armstrong blow his horn, not recite monologues. In fact, frantic revisions were made in an attempt to save the show, giving Armstrong more trumpet time, but it was too little too late, and it couldn’t raise the sinking ship.

Erik Charrel clearly had an eye for stage production, but he didn’t understand that Swing had soul. The play contained no vernacular language or autonomy on the part of the performers. Bud Freeman, one of the few white artists in the production, later wrote in his autobiography that “if Charell had known the greatness of the black people, he could have had a revue that would still be running”. For Jeffrey Horowitz, the founding artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, not bringing in a Black co-writer was a big missed opportunity. “There’s no person in that writing team who knows anything about African-American culture and jazz,” he said. “They could have had Langston Hughes, they could have had Zora Neale Hurston. I don’t think they even thought of that” (The Times, 2021).

The world of the play mirrored this control placed over the artists: the lords and lovers were played by white actors, and the roles of the plantation workers and entertainers fell to the black cast. This, in turn, echoed societal structures of the time, which black audiences probably would not have wanted played out on the stage. I’ve found no complaints from the black artists about the racial stereotypes and typecasting, only enthusiasm for the spectacular. Those were times of financial hardships, and the production was praised for offering jobs to so many black artists. However,  Philip Carter asked in the Amsterdam News (one of New York’s most prominent black newspapers): “There are those who may feel that the Dream deserves the same sort of support of any other enterprise when there are 150 Negroes drawing salaries. But the same high ideals will cause still others to feel that such support only shoves farther into the distant future the day when Negro actors and Negro art will be recognised without lampooning and burlesque” (The Times, 2021). 

Apparently, the play appealed to no one then: it offered neither Swinging entertainment nor a racial revolution. It was too black for white Shakespeare aficionados and too minstrelesque for a highbrow black audience. It was too much of a nothingness, by all accounts, and cost the producers today’s equivalent of $2m. By the end of the run, they were giving tickets away just to fill seats.  

Yet in 2020, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic and New York’s Theater for a New Audience teamed up to salvage the remaining fragments of the script and attempt to resuscitate this massive flop. I am maddeningly curious to see the final result, but it seems to have vanished from the internet. It was due to stream via the RSC website on January 9th 2021, but I cannot find a shred of evidence that it ever happened. The articles I’ve read about it were published in the lead-up to the streaming, but nothing has been said about its delivery. The project took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, so who knows what may have transpired. I’ve searched the archives, and I’m still trying to make contact with the RSC and the Young Vic but so far, no joy. I hope I’ll be able to report back with the recording sometime in the future.

In the meantime, here is Darn that Dream – the song that far outlived the play.