Doing the Harlem Hop

By T.E. Kalem

BUBBLING BROWN SUGAR

"The blacker the berry, the sweet er the juice," Louis Armstrong often said. "Brown sugar" was a term of en dearment for chorus girls in Harlem in the '20s and '30s. Both sweet and sizzling, this loosely structured show is a song and dance ramble. During the edgy militant '60s, any black who danced was regarded as a toe-tapping Uncle Tom, and any black who sang was regarded as an evangelical sponge. What a treat it is to see blacks singing and dancing as if those skills were not blemishes on intellect or race but blessings of body and voice.

The book is for the wastebasket. A young black couple is taken on a tour down memory lane by three canny professionals (Avon Long, Josephine Premice and Joseph Attles) who are old but ageless. But there is no frost on their bones. This show comes from the tor rid zone.

The dancers are expert stylists. The songs and the singers possess a matching beauty, and at rehearing It Don't Mean a Thing, Sophisticated Lady and Solitude, one realizes that in Ellington we lost not a duke but a king.

While much of Bubbling Brown Sug ar is saturated with nostalgia, one girl in it, Vivian Reed, has the fresh, flaming force of a new comet entering the earth's orbit. Her movement is sinuous, her presence is magnetic, her voice is torchy. Sans Con Edison, she could light up a Broadway marquee.

T.E. Kalem

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