Broadway in Black & White: The Untold Story of the American Musical

Summary

Long before racial integration became the law of the land, Broadway showed Americans what it could look and sound like.

Shaped by Black musical traditions, European theatrical forms, and immigrant cultures, the Broadway musical emerged in the twentieth century as a visceral embodiment of the American melting pot. In Broadway in Black and White, conductor and historian John Mauceri—together with linguist and cultural commentator John H. McWhorter—presents a dazzling history of collaboration between Black and white artists in the American musical theater.

Moving from ragtime and operetta through Show Boat and Shuffle Along to The Lion King, Ragtime, and Hamilton, Mauceri reveals how Broadway’s social and political influence extends far beyond artistic achievements and commercial successes. Incisive, deeply personal interludes by McWhorter offer a parallel perspective on the American musical as a testament to cultural exchange.

Mauceri and McWhorter illustrate how the Broadway musical both reflected and accelerated the nation’s continued strides toward racial equality. Politically active works confronted prejudice and invited audiences to imagine a more just society. Equally potent was the visible fact of Black and white artists writing, creating, and performing together, when segregation still shaped much of American life.

Together, Mauceri and McWhorter celebrate the American musical as an art form belonging to all of us. Though this history contains prejudice, exclusion, compromise, and contradiction, it is also a history of extraordinary progress.

Broadway in Black and White lovingly presents Broadway as a metaphor for America in all its complexity—fragmented and imperfect, yet eminently capable of becoming greater than the sum of its parts.

"Broadway in Black and White is an excavation and celebration of the African American contribution to the Broadway musical, which disabuses the alabaster legend of 'the Great White Way.'"—John Lahr, author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh