Crossover Shows
By 1911, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, and George Walker had died. Will Marion Cook and the Johnson brothers, James and J. Rosamond, had pursued new careers and Bert Williams moved to the Ziegfeld Follies and black musical theater went into a hiatus.
In 1915 ragtime composer Scott Joplin attempted to stage an opera Treemonisha in Harlem but the show was a financial and critical failure and Joplin was ruined and retreated into retirement until his death in 1917.
In May 1921, the surprising hit Shuffle Along made its way to New York City with almost $18,000 in debt. "One of the most popular black shows of the 1920s; began to tinker with the pattern of segregation". The creators of the astronomical point in history are The Dixie Duo, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, who met at a party in Baltimore, Maryland in 1915. Their career was brief but successful. "Shuffle Along was a milestone in the development of the black musical, and it became the model by which all black musicals were judged until well into the 1930s." F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who wrote the book for Shuffle Along (1921) had met in 1906, and began performing at the "Pekin Theater Stock Company" near Chicago from 1906 to 1909, along with other African American stars such as Harry Lawrence Freeman.
In 1921, Miller and Lyles appeared in a short film made in Photokinema, a sound-on-disc process, singing their composition "De Ducks", while Sissle and Blake made three films in the Lee De Forest Phonofilm sound-on-film process in 1923. These short films are a record of music similar to the work these four men were doing on stage at the time...
Read more about this topic: African American Musical Theater
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