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| Hattie Winston, Al Freeman, Jr. |
THE GREAT MACDADDY [Musical/Drugs/Race] B: Paul Carter Harrison; M: Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson; D: Douglas Turner Ward; CH: Dianne McIntyre; S: Gary James Wheeler; C: Mary Mease Warren; L: Ken Billington; P: Negro Ensemble Company; T: St. Marks Playhouse (OB); 2/12/74-4/17/74 (72)
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| Al Freeman, Jr., David Downing. |
An allegorical, pageant-like, ritualistic, freeform black
musical composed of a constantly shifting series of vignettes (called “beats”).
It begins in a Prohibition-era Los Angeles funeral parlor, and makes an
erratic, nonlinear odyssey through the years, sometimes forward, sometimes
back. Book writer Paul Carter Harrison called it “a ritualized African/American
event inspired by the African story-telling technique advanced by Amos Tutuola
in his world-famous novel, The Palm Wine
Drinkard,” a work several reviewers admitted never having heard of, much
less read.
The Great MacDaddy centers
on young MacDaddy (David Dowling, replaced during the run by Cleavon Little), a
Candide-like man, son of a major bootlegger, who goes off on a symbolic search
across America for Wine (Graham Brown), the possessor of a magic formula for
palm wine, his people’s traditional African beverage. With his magical ju-ju
stick in hand and a girlfriend (Hattie Winston), saved from a brothel, at his
side, MacDaddy confronts the evil enslaving and oppressive forces that have plagued
black people; in the process, he grows in stature and strength.
He continually comes into conflict with the ubiquitous Scag
(Al Freeman, Jr., replaced during the run by Robert Hooks), representing heroin
and white oppression. Scag is played with a death’s head makeup and assumes
various guises according to the needs of the seven scenes. The other actors
also vary their roles as required, thereby presenting a cross-section of black
American types and verbal styles.
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| Graham Brown, Hattie Winston, David Downing. |
Often bordering on the incoherent, the work was nevertheless
accepted as a vastly original conception. Clive Barnes saw in it the beginnings
of an indigenous black musical theatre style. This work of “tremendous theatre”
combined influences from “the black-African and West Indian past,” as well as
native American culture, and was combined excitingly with the music of Coleridge
Tayler-Perkinso, ranging “from blues, to rural to spiritual to soul . . .
crossing the spectrum of black music with dazzling ease,” as Martin Gottfried
praised it.
Douglas Turner Ward provided superior direction, the songs
being “truly sung, with admirable feeling and animation . . . and the dancing
is so skillful and spirited that it seems to rise spontaneously out of each
situation,” according to Edith Oliver. A rare dissenter was Douglas Watt, for
whom The Great MacDaddy was “unsuccessful,”
“undramatic,” and “both static and bewildering.”
The show won an OBIE for Distinguished Play.
