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:
“The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)