Welcome to the Great Black Way!

When the nation's first black theater group opened in New York City in 1821, race-baiting whites in the audience proved so unruly that the company had to close down. Broadway today is witness to an explosion of all-black shows, which are also being loudly and insistently stopped by their audiences. This time round the unruly, enthusiastic applause leaves performers and producers in a state of ecstatic wilt.

More than a quarter of all current Broadway shows--seven of them--are black. Porgy and Bess, returning in the full operatic panoply of George Gershwin's original version (TIME, July 19), has for four straight weeks broken all box-office records for a legitimate Broadway show. The black edition of Guys and Dolls, the long-running The Wiz (Oz over a different rainbow), and Bubbling Brown Sugar, a revue celebrating Harlem in its Cotton Club heyday, are all doing turnaway business. So is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a "choreopoem" about being black and female that is one of the most poignant dramas to fill a commercial theater in years. More important yet, Broadway's black bonanza has drawn together an array of talent--actors, singers, dancers, writers, choreographers and directors--as well as steadily growing numbers of black theatergoers--who can only enrich popular culture in all its manifestations.

There has never been any shortage of trained, gifted black artists, and television was the first national showcase for many of them. Now the opportunity has expanded in a major way to legitimate theater. Ironically, at a time when strong parts for women are lamentably lacking in white shows, it is the black actresses, all around 30, who are now sovereign on Broadway.

> Clamma Dale, for instance, brings to the role of Bess high musical polish and dramatic intelligence, a voice of molten gold and the fierce grace of a stalking leopard. Porgy made her, at 28, an instant star; she is booked for theater, opera and concert appearances through 1978. The youngest child of a middle-class family in Chester, Pa., the incomparable Clamma learned to play the cello, clarinet, piano, saxophone and guitar guided by her father, an oil-refinery worker and part-time jazz musician. Before winning a Naumburg Foundation Award and a contract with the New York City Opera Company a year ago, Clamma, a Juilliard graduate, taught music and the poetry of Goethe and Schiller to prisoners on New York's Riker's Island. She hopes to play such operatic rolls as Margherita in Mefistofele and straight dramatic parts like Nora in A Doll's House.

> Vivian Reed, a sizzling, sinuous singer-actress-clown-tap dancer, alone turns Bubbling Brown Sugar into a mousse to remember. She was singing gospel at churches around her native Pittsburgh by the age of eight, and studied classical music at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute before winning a three-year Juilliard scholarship. "I had aspirations of going to the Met and being Leontyne Price," she recalls, "but I switched to popular music and blues because it gave greater freedom of expression and I liked the audience." A veteran of the resort and supper-club circuit, she has a new album. Brown Sugar (unrelated to the show), out this month which includes several songs of her own composition.

> Norma Donaldson as adenoidal Miss Adelaide, "the well-known fiancee" of Guys and Dolls, also steals the show from under the noses of gifted fellow performers. Manhattan-born, she set out to be a nun, but after singing in church choirs and glee clubs opted for show biz instead. She played roles ranging from Georgina in Hallelujah, Baby! on Broadway to Kiss Me Kate in Beverly, Mass., and the The Great White Hope in Washington, D.C.

> Ernestine Jackson as Sister Sarah, the Salvation Army lass in Guys and Dolls, can make Frank Loesser sound like West-side Verdi. From a poor family in Corpus Christi, Ernestine also won a Juilliard scholarship, got a part in the black Hello, Dolly! and went on to Jesus Christ Superstar and Raisin on Broadway.

> Trazana Beverley, one of the seven fervent actress-dancers in Colored Girls, so searingly creates a bloody tale of love's savagery that theatergoers sob unabashedly. The daughter of a Baltimore brickmason and a schoolteacher, and a graduate of New York University's School of the Arts, the big, bulky, consummately disciplined actress spent eight long years making it to Broadway.

> Ntozake Shange, who wrote Colored Girls, and performs in it, is writing two more plays for Joseph Papp, the Public Theater impresario, who nurtured this first effort of hers and brought it to Broadway. The daughter of a wealthy New Jersey surgeon, she earned a master's degree at the University of Southern California before going off to learn what life and dying (she attempted suicide four times) is like in the ghetto. Shange, nee Paulette Williams, has written a new theater piece based on the lives of Alexandre Dumas pere et fils which will be produced by Papp.

Black women by no means steal all the honors. Donnie Ray Albert portrays Porgy with great dignity and vocal distinction. Robert Guillaume as Nathan Detroit, the compulsive gambler and altar dodger of Guys and Dolls, is as wry, spry and dry a dude as ever weathered a floating crap game. However, it is the authority and finely honed theatrical skills of a Dale or a Reed or a Donaldson that succeed in making black passionately beautiful on Broadway.

If Manhattan's theater district has become a Great Black Way, other cities throughout the U.S. have also welcomed and nourished black talent. Bubbling broke box-office records in Philadelphia and four other cities. Wiz will open in Chicago this month with one of the biggest advance sales in the city's history.

Some of the liveliest black shows originate out of town. Me and Bessie, the play about the great blues singer Bessie Smith, came to New York from California, via Washington, B.C., where the Ford's Theatre's venturesome white executive producer, Frankie Hewitt, played the show for five sold-out weeks. Hewitt's production of Vinette Carroll's Your Arm's Too Short to Box with God was a hit for five months at the Ford's, and is set for a Broadway run.

Resident black repertory groups, following the lead of Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company, the first full-fledged company to use black playwrights and directors exclusively, have found roots in just about every major city. Baltimore's Arena Players, Washington's B.C. Black Repertory Company, Chicago's Kuumba Workshop, New Orleans' Bashiki Theater have all supported black theater during its difficult transition from the fist-waving polemics of the '60s to a fuller, more relaxed mode today. As Bashiki's artistic director Ted Gilliam notes: "Buring the '60s some writers went to great lengths to write what was at the time ideologically in fashion. Now there seems to be a gradual trend toward writers with deep, personal feelings about life, who are expressing those views as they sincerely believe it to be rather than as they think it ought to be, according to someone else's philosophy."

Plug Shows. Bespite all the gains, financing remains an Excedrin-proof headache for most would-be black producers. Some black impresarios--notably Melvin Van Peebles with the 1971 Ain 't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, followed soon after by Don't Play Us Cheap--have gone directly to the black community and drafted preachers and teachers to get out the audience and plug shows as if they were the last revival meeting. So, in a way, they are. Between black performers and black audiences, linked by subtle nuances of black language and black experience, there is a crackling communion that often electrifies white audiences as well. There is also the question of black pride. When a white New York critic panned Wiz, suggesting that black is not all that beautiful, Harlem's Amsterdam News ran an outraged front-page editorial ordering readers to get on down to the Majestic Theater. The crucial Friday night box-office take rose from an anemic pre-pan $2,500 to $90,000 the next week and $120,000 the week after. It has stayed at that level, though the audiences are now about 80% white.

The performers too radiate a new pride. Exults Bubbling's Vivian Reed: "We have not only shown that we can make rhythm and blues--something we have been doing for ages--but that we can hold up--light up--Broadway." What is also abundantly clear, to casts and audiences alike, is that excellence transcends color. As Sister Sarah Ernestine Jackson puts it: "If it's good, it's good, black or white."

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