Digging for the Roots

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two musicals limn the troubles and triumphs of blacks

In white America, a black man's otherness is stamped indelibly on his face. Whether he runs the 100-meter dash or runs for President, whether he orates like Martin Luther King Jr. or drawls like Stepin Fetchit, his color sets him apart. For him the American melting pot can sear faster than it assimilates. And so he looks to his roots, finding solace in soul, while fixing an eye on the main chance of upward mobility. His tragedy is that, in both worlds, he may end up a stranger.

One new Broadway musical not only addresses this dilemma, it seems to share it. The Tap Dance Kid may sound like the saga of young Bojangles Robinson, but it is really A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in blackface and with the priorities reversed. Its subject is the aspirations and frustrations of the black middle class. Daddy (Samuel E. Wright) is a successful lawyer, living in a Manhattan duplex with his wife Ginnie (Hattie Winston), their 13-year-old daughter Emma (Marline Allard) and their ten-year-old son Willie (Alfonso Ribeiro). Emma wants to be an attorney; Willie just gotta dance, under the eager tutorial eye of his raffish uncle Dipsey (Hinton Battle). If Dad is willing to indulge Emma's career goal, he is adamant that Willie will never put on taps. "We didn't get off the plantation," he argues in a quick history lesson, "until we stopped dancin' and started doin'."

When this show starts dancing, it does just fine. Danny Daniels' spunky chorus line works up a lovely sweat in one number (Fabulous Feet) that piles climax upon exhilarating climax; in another (Dance if It Makes You Happy), Willie dreams of tapping his cares away in the company of Bojangles, Astaire and the entire MGM back lot. Battle, a natural-born Broadway stunner, captivates the audience with an electrifying spirit that surges from his head to all ten toes. But the other family members are often deadly serious; they express themselves in Composer Henry Krieger's capacious Tin Pan arias, which haunt the ear without paying much more than lip service to the Afro rhythms that energized his Dreamgirls score. In the final gasp of the show's schizophrenia, young Willie comes to a perverse decision about the show he has dreamed of appearing in. It satisfies his parents but not a Broadway musical audience. How could it when a tap-dance kid says, in effect, "I won't dance, don't ask me"?

Across the East River from the Great White Way, some 60 gospel shouters are shaking the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the soaring sounds of religious fervor. The Gospel at Colonus is an unlikely enterprise: the story of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus as it might be enacted by a black evangelical congregation on a splendid Sunday morning. Sophocles' theme was man's acceptance of the inevitability of death; Adapter-Director Lee Breuer's is the black man's and woman's reconciliation to a hard life in these United States. If Breuer's staging is occasionally drab and tentative, Composer Bob Telson's score displays an inventive fidelity to traditional blues and spirituals.

The large cast would make a true believer of any prissy infidel. Clarence Fountain, leading the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, incarnates the eyeless Theban exile with a savage lyricism. Carolyn White, singing the inspirational Lift Him Up, merges volume and discipline and an awesome range. And Carl Williams Jr. cheerleads the Institutional Radio Choir toward communal ecstasy. Implicitly, the Gospel performers offer some sage advice to their troubled musical relatives on Broadway: If you can't tap-dance your way to assimilation, then sing out your uniqueness in a joyful noise.

--By Richard Corliss