Hot Feet, Vamps and Ragmatazz

By T.E. Kalem

EUBIE!

Music by Eubie Blake

The opening-night curtain call at Eubie! would certainly have astonished the patrons of Miss Aggie's bawdyhouse in Baltimore, where James Hubert Blake played ragtime piano at the turn of the century. Thin as a blade, remarkably spry and mentally trigger-quick, Eubie confounds his 95 years. At Broadway's Ambassador Theater he mounted the stage, accepted a single rose in tribute, engaged in amiable banter and joined cast and audience alike as they roared out their affection by paraphrasing his biggest hit: "I'm just wild about Eubie."

Had the score been published when it was originally composed, people might first have gone wild about Eubie in 1899 when he wrote Charleston Rag. In that selfsame year Scott Joplin turned out Maple Leaf Rag. Eubie had an unlikely background for a composer. The son of ex-slaves, he had dropped out of school at 15. He was the only one of eleven children to live to maturity. Ragtime was regarded as indecent music; his mother never permitted him to play it in the house. Initially, Eubie toured the vaudeville circuit with Singer Noble Sissle. In 1921, with Sissle as lyricist, the pair scored a national breakthrough with Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical ever to be produced, directed, composed and performed solely by blacks.

Through an interesting process of historical change, Eubie! probably owes its existence to the current vogue for all-black musicals. Ironically, where a Shuffle Along, a Blackbirds of 1930 or a Chocolate Dandies (two other shows for which Eubie wrote the music) were intended for all-white audiences, the current production courts black playgoers. As a measure of heightened self-esteem and possibly amused self-parody, blacks are now willing to admit that they can be superb singers and dancers -- something that was regarded as a condescending racial stereotype in the '60s.

They are certainly singing and dancing with gut-lusty abandon in Eubie! If the twelve members of the cast were sent to Washington, they could undoubtedly resolve the energy crisis in two hours. Yet as a musical revue without a narrative line or cohesive theme, Eubie! ranks as a mini-clone of Ain 't Misbehavin '. That is not too difficult to understand, since Fats Waller's musical imagination was richer than Blake's in wit, satire and sophistication. Eubie! is thoroughly entertaining and unerringly professional, but it bubbles more often than it blazes.

The magnetic high spots of the show are provided by the brothers Gregory and Maurice Hines, whose feet are tap-dancing marvels of percussive precision.

Lonnie McNeill brings an urbane elegance and a honeyed tongue to In Honeysuckle Time. Sex becomes a four-letter word when musky-voiced Lynnie Godfrey smolders through such numbers as Daddy and I'm Craving for That Kind of Love. Looking like an iridescent flapper from the '20s, Ethel Beatty makes Memories of You a heartbreak blues. Just about the entire cast puts sizzling bawdy English into If You've Never Been Vamped by a Brownskin, You've Never Been Vamped at All. Miss Aggie apparently taught Eubie more than he could ever forget.

-- T.E.Kalem

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