African American Musical Theater - Porgy and Bess, The WPA, The Swing Mikado, and Carmen Jones

Porgy and Bess, The WPA, The Swing Mikado, and Carmen Jones

George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) – starring Will Marion Cook's wife Abbie Mitchell among many others – is the most famous black musical of the 1930s. It is called a black musical because of the African American cast, even though neither the music or plot is of the “Negro inspiration” like the creators proclaim. "Porgy and Bess marked the nadir in the history of black musical comedy, symbolizing the end of tradition and experimentation in black musical theater on Broadway". This also led the Works Progress Administration to start the Federal Theater Project that established the Negro Unit with programs in twenty-two cities. This gave a new break to the struggling artists. The Negro Unit avoided musical comedies, but had a few musicals with black cast including Eubie Blake’s Swing It, which closed in 1937 and lessened hope for the Federal Theater Project.

However, one black musical comedy succeeded and twisted the new realm of musical theater, The Swing Mikado (1937), a "modernization" of Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic operetta, The Mikado. This was followed by The Hot Mikado (1939). Another modern version of the classics was Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway musical Carmen Jones (1943), a version of Georges Bizet’s Carmen with an all-black cast.