Sugar Chile to the Rescue

Nothing like it had ever happened to a Sigmund Romberg operetta before. In Detroit, the Civic Light Opera Association decided that Romberg's My Maryland needed a bright boy to jive it up a little--and they knew just the right boy to do it. Frank ("Sugar Chile") Robinson, a young Negro (who is eight according to his father, eleven according to school records), is a piano-playing natural.

There was no suitable role for him in the operetta, based in part on the Barbara Frietchie story.* So the manager wrote in a speaking part for him. Sugar Chile, already a movie veteran (No Leave, No Love), brought the house down when he fell on his knees and burst into tears before Barbara Frietchie. But most of the audience had really come for Sugar Chile's between-the-acts boogie-woogie. Last week My Maryland did an unexpected business at the box office.

Pint-sized Sugar Chile, who sat at the piano with his back to the audience, swung his legs in a savage rhythm, played a rumbling bass. Sugar Chile still cannot reach an octave easily, but says "I can do it with a little jump."

As an actor, Sugar Chile was as happy as his audience. Said he last week: "It's like a jigsaw puzzle. You come to rehearsal, do a little bit, then they put it all together. When the show goes on, you walk out, say your piece and that's all there is to it. When you play the piano, you really gotta play loud, then you gotta bow, then play again. You never know when you're through."

* Completely legendary. After writing his famous poem about Barbara, Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was told that Stonewall Jackson did not even pass the Frietchie house in Frederick, Md. and that if he had, Barbara could not have leaned out the window to speak her impassioned lines ("Shoot, if you must, this old gray head . . .") as she was bedfast at the time. Snapped Whittier: "It seems to be admitted that Barbara Frietchie had a Union flag in her house; if she did not show it on that occasion, so much the worse for Frederick City."

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