Fifty years ago, a small but spunky musical about "race relations" in the South ran on Broadway for about 700 performances. The musical was based on a play by the celebrated actor and dean of black theater and motion picture performers Ossie Davis -- Purlie Victorious. The play had earlier been adapted into a motion picture starring Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, a young Alan Alda and Sorrel Booke, whom many would come to know as Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard. (A link to the full motion picture is below.) The play has long been included in published anthologies of outstanding theatrical work as an example of satirical social commentary.
The 1970 musical, whose title was shortened to Purlie, told the same story as the stage play -- a con-man preacher returns to the Georgia plantation of his birth to try to pull one over on the Ol' Cap'n, win ownership of a cherished old church and "free" the plantation workers from their lives of picking cotton. The show starred new faces Melba Moore (Cousin Lutiebelle) and Cleavon Little (the title character), both of whom won Tonys for their performances. Five years later, Little would go on to international fame as the sheriff in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles. Troubled with chronic stomach and intestinal problems, Little died in 1992, at 54. Moore will be 80 in October.
Purlie is a small show but has several rousing musical numbers -- "I Got Love," "Newfangled Preacher Man," "Walk Him Up the Stairs," among them -- and has seen a few revivals and restagings over the years, with the most familiar likely being the television special in 1981 that starred Moore, Robert Guillaume (Benson) and Sherman Helmsley (George Jefferson of The Jeffersons), who like Moore was an original cast member.
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