Importance
During its four-year tour, In Dahomey proved one of the most successful musical comedies of its era. The show helped make its composer, lyricist and leading performers household names. Significantly, the New York Theater production of In Dahomey marked the first full-length African American musical to be staged in an indoors venue on Broadway (following the earlier success of Clorindy in a rooftop setting). Furthermore, In Dahomey was the first black musical to have its score published (albeit in England, not America).
In Dahomey also marked an important milestone in the evolution of the American musical comedy. The score made use of the "high operetta style" that its composer Will Marion Cook had studied, in addition to using the relatively new form of ragtime in its finale, "The Czar of Dixie." According to John Graziano, author of Black Theatre USA, it was "the first African American show that synthesized successfully the various genres of American musical theatre popular at the beginning of the twentieth century—minstrelsy, vaudeville, comic opera, and musical comedy."
Read more about this topic: In Dahomey
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)