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| Frances Salisbury, Louise Stubbs. |
THE PRODIGAL SISTER [Musical/Family/Prostitution/Race/Southern] B: J.B. Franklin; M: Micki Grant; LY: J.E. Franklin, Micki Grant; D: Shauneille Perry; CH: Rod Rodgers; DS: C. Richard Mills; C: Judy Dearing; P: Woodie King, Jr.; T: Theatre de Lys (OB); 11/25/74-12/29/74 (40)
The Biblical tale about the prodigal son inspired this Black
musical with rhymed dialogue about Jackie (Paula Desmond), a 17-year-old girl
from a Georgia small town, who gets pregnant. To escape her father’s (Leonard
Jackson) wrath, she runs away to Baltimore. Her adventures in the big city are
seen as if in the crystal ball of a seeress.
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| Frances Salisbury, Frank Carey, Esther Brown. |
In Baltimore, she becomes indentured to Baltimore Bessie
(Louise Stubbs), proprietress of a combination coffin factory and whorehouse. Jackie
eventually gets herself shipped home—in a company casket—to be joyfully
welcomed back by her anxious but forgiving family.
Musical numbers included "Slip Away," "Ain't Marrying Nobody," "If You Know What's Good for You," "Big City Dance," "Sister Love," "Hot Pants Dance," and, among others, "The Prodigal Has Returned."
Largely negative reviews sealed the fate of this show, which
had begun life as an Off-Off Broadway showcase. Clive Barnes viewed it as an
artlessly naïve work, whose “good nature and fervor seems to stand somewhere
between a block party and a revival meeting.” It was “robustly comic, sometimes
touching,” to John Beaufort. But to Martin Gottfried the evening was “the world’s
longest 90 minutes,” the two-dozen songs were “in a soul style drained of life,”
the choreography was “a self-parody,” and the direction was “utterly without
drive.” It was “too simple-minded” by far for Douglas Watt, while Edith Oliver
described it as “a coarsely drawn caricature of middle-class black life,” with
embarrassing stereotypes and a vulgar plot. John Simon flushed it away as “of
unsurpassable emptiness and amateurishness.”
