Cinderella Is a Negro

Hallelujah, Baby! Broadway frequently believes that it is more blessed to borrow than to beget, which is why so many musicals seem like retrospective shows of previous shows. Hallelujah, Baby! takes the standard saga of a showbiz Cinderella who wants a Shubert Alley marquee for her tiara and combines it with an up-from-wage-slavery plot dating from the social-protest '30s. The only novelty is that the protagonists are Negroes. While it affects to be a six-decade panorama of Negro advancement, the show is more like a petrified forest of liberal and sentimental cliches through which twinkles a fresh new mini-star, rising from television and supper clubs, Leslie Uggams.

When the curtain rises, the time is 1900, and Cinderella--here named Georgina--is in "the white folks' kitchen," mopping. Her mama, a five-by-five fortress of a woman (Lillian Hayman), argues that a mop is a Negro girl's best friend. But Georgina (Uggams) begs her prince charming, a Pullman porter named Clem (Robert Hooks), to take her away from all this. Together, they take the overground railway North.

During the '20s, Georgina dances in a kind of Cotton Club revue up in Harlem until the Depression, presumably white-inspired, puts her out of work. The never-aging lovers tiff as Clem takes up the cause of the Negro, while Georgina relentlessly pursues her personality cult to stardom. In a phenomenally unsurprising ending, Clem, now a civil rights leader, clinches with Georgina, who has tasted the empty celebrity worship of white sycophants.

The numbing slim-wittedness of Arthur Laurents' book seems to have infected the score: the songs evaporate as they leave the orchestra pit, despite such potent tunesmiths as Composer Jule Styne or Lyricists Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Some of the dances catch fire, notably a G.I. close-order drill done with smoking speed to syncopated shouts, and in a show that is more candied than candid, Leslie Uggams and Robert Hooks perform with unblemished, infectiously likable honesty. Apart from being lovely to look at, Uggams has a shy sly smile that burgles the theater house. She can cradle a song with her voice or rifle it toward the night sky like a tracer bullet. At 23, she is a Broadway find with a future.

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