After Midnight began as a collaboration between Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Jack Viertel, artistic director of Encores, an organization that puts on concert stagings of old musicals. Viertel says the show came about "largely because I have a fixation with Harold Arlen."
The songwriter, famous for songs like "Stormy Weather" and "Over the Rainbow," wrote material for the Cotton Club early in his career, Viertel notes.
"And Wynton has a lifelong obsession with Duke Ellington," he says. "And while Arlen was writing songs for the Cotton Club, Duke Ellington [led] the house band of the Cotton Club."
'Jungle Music' And Contraband Hooch
Viertel and Marsalis drew on old photographs, YouTube videos and classic recordings, searching for inspiration about both content and atmosphere. And that atmosphere, let's not forget, was a complicated one: The Cotton Club was a mob joint, owned by a Chicago gangster named Owney Madden, created as a way to sell booze at inflated prices during Prohibition. And while it was located on Lenox Avenue in the heart of Harlem, it was open to whites only.
"It was infamously racially exclusive," says Levering Lewis, the NYU historian. "W.C. Handy wished to go one evening to the Cotton Club, and he was turned away. And he could hear his music being performed!"
That gives pause to actor Dul Hill, who serves as emcee for After Midnight — singing, dancing and delivering the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.
"As much as we try, I don't think we'll really ever understand what that felt like," Hill says. "To come on the stage and to be so fabulous, and to be so amazing and to be so elegant and classy, but not be able to sit down."
The original Cotton Club revues featured some offensive racial stereotyping — the emcee was fond of introducing Ellington as "the greatest living master of jungle music" — which the show consciously avoids.
"I think we decided that one of the services we could do for the artists who created the work originally was to give them an opportunity to be liberated from that circumstance," Viertel says. "We didn't think it would serve them, or our current cast or musicians, to ... circumvent the joy of the art with the shame of the social reality, which continues in this country in various ways, up to this very day."
But After Midnight is not trying to whitewash history, Dul Hill argues.
"It's not that we're brushing it underneath the rug and saying, "No, don't pay any attention to that,'" he says. "That informs everything we're doing. But we're choosing to celebrate. And life is all about choice. And so is art."
Standards And Rarities, And A Revolving Stage Door
Like the Cotton Club revues, After Midnight features a rotating group of guest stars. Fantasia Barrino, the American Idol winner, opened the show; she's being followed by Canadian crooner K.D. Lang.