Absence of authenticity is not the motive. Its rating was penned by white guys but so were being the scores of “Purlie” and “Dreamgirls.” A lack of flash may have been a component: “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” are spectacles, as a lot about costumes and dancing as how they audio. But “Purlie” is about a number of folks in a couple of rooms conversing about complications, just like “Raisin.”
A likely explanation “Raisin” is not a lot revived is a perception that a perform as significant as Lorraine Hansberry’s should really be preserved as it was, that environment it to songs is intrusive or at minimum needless. Ethan Mordden, a historian of musical theater whom I keep in the extremely greatest esteem, wrote: “The songs are finely judged. But they insert very little to what Hansberry wrote. They are what Hansberry wrote which is the difficulty.”
Folks said the similar about turning “Pygmalion” into “My Fair Lady.” I myself watch Hansberry’s engage in as something close to scripture, but the musical pulls off some items that the enjoy simply cannot. In the play, the minor boy, Travis, can ordinarily make only so considerably of an perception simply because the performing ability of children that age is generally restricted (even though the 1st person to play that position was Glynn Thurman, the now celebrated veteran actor, and he was almost certainly outstanding). In the musical, nonetheless, Travis receives a captivating very little music called “Sidewalk Tree” and comes across to us vividly. “He Come Down This Morning” provides us the Youthful family singing in church, a central factor of their weekly existence that the perform, with out audio, just can’t provide. And though “A Raisin in the Sun” unwittingly initiated a style that George C. Wolfe affectionately dissed, in “The Coloured Museum,” as the “Mama-on-the-sofa engage in,” “Raisin”’s new music for the mom, Lena, — particularly the unjustly neglected ballad “Measure the Valleys” — transcends any cliché.
“Raisin” is also exclusive in getting about Black people just getting discussions. Clearing the desk, standing about, answering the doorbell. Most Black musicals are about performers, flash, funk, scarecrows, witches, the Supremes or one thing like them, silvery gleaming, yellow brick, bluesy quantities that increase the roof. All excellent. But in the warm duet “Sweet Time,” “Raisin” has what might be the first Broadway tune in which a Black few only converse with each individual other fairly than proclaim and prance for the viewers.
“A Raisin in the Sun” is undoubtedly just one of the finest performs ever written in the English language. There is a explanation it has been revived on Broadway not at the time but 2 times in the 21st century alone, as very well as after Off Broadway, and is normally performed by regional and local community theater teams. (I feel I have noticed it 7 moments.) Nevertheless, it is ever more distant from us in time. It was valued in 1959 as offering white theatergoers their initial sustained seem into Black life, but they have experienced several much more these types of seems to be since. Housing segregation nevertheless exists, but not in the overt sort of the covenants that the enjoy so searingly depicts. Ambivalence about assimilation to white approaches persists among the quite a few Black individuals, but the color line is not what it was. Today if Black folks assimilate, it is to a whiteness that is no longer as pure as it was in the 1950s, having been remodeled by the “browning” of the society.
