Gospel Stage Musical
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The Black gospel stage musical — Langston Hughes coined "gospel song-play" for it — puts full-throated church gospel performance on the professional stage: real gospel soloists, quartets, and choirs carrying a dramatic narrative, its recorded legacy preserved on Broadway and Off-Broadway cast albums rather than church songbooks. Where the church folk-musical was published for congregations to perform, this is performer-driven theater, running from Hughes' carols-and-spirituals nativity through Vinnette Carroll's song-sermon revues to the touring "gospel play" circuit that rebranded the chitlin circuit as urban theater and incubated Tyler Perry. The music is uncompromised gospel — shout choruses, quartet harmony, testimony solos — staged with narrative rather than diluted into showtune idiom.
History
Langston Hughes' Black Nativity (Off-Broadway, December 1961) launched the form, its cast — Marion Williams & the Stars of Faith, Princess Stewart, and Alex Bradford — cutting the Vee-Jay cast album in 1962; Vinnette Carroll's Urban Arts Corps carried it to Broadway with Micki Grant's Grammy-winning Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope (1972) and the Alex Bradford/Micki Grant song-sermon Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976, a Tony win for Delores Hall); Vy Higginsen's Mama, I Want to Sing (1983) became the longest-running Black Off-Broadway musical from Harlem's Heckscher Theatre; Lee Breuer and Bob Telson's The Gospel at Colonus (BAM 1983, Broadway 1988, a 1985 Pulitzer drama finalist) set Sophocles in a Pentecostal service with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama as Oedipus; and the 1990s touring gospel play — David E. Talbert, and Tyler Perry from I Know I've Been Changed (1998) onward — turned the circuit into the springboard for Perry's film empire, while Black Nativity endures as an annual holiday institution.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Wasn't That a Mighty Day(1962) — Marion Williams & the Stars of FaithSpotifyYouTube
- Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope(1972) — Micki GrantSpotifyYouTube
- Your Arms Too Short to Box with God(1976) — Alex BradfordSpotifyYouTube
- Can't No Grave Hold My Body Down(1976) — Alex BradfordSpotifyYouTube
- Mama, I Want to Sing(1983) — Doris TroySpotifyYouTube
- Stop Do Not Go On — The Five Blind Boys of AlabamaSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- "Black Nativity", Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Nativity
- Vee-Jay Album Discography Part 4: Gospel Series (LP-5022 Black Nativity original cast, 1962), https://www.bsnpubs.com/veejay/veejaygospel.html
- "The Gospel at Colonus", Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_at_Colonus
- "Mama, I Want to Sing! (musical)", Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama,_I_Want_to_Sing!_(musical)