8 - Fragmented musicals and 1970s soul aesthetic

Summary

Premiering as part of the 1971 Broadway season, Melvin Van Peebles’s turbulent, strange, violent, authentic, funny, realistic, and pointedly exaggerated musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death debuted on Broadway with the expectation from critics that it would not run for more than two weeks. The same year that Marvin Gaye introduced a sense of political consciousness to the Motown sound with his landmark album What’s Going On? also brought Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAsssss Song, which revolutionized independent cinema – all but creating the blaxploitation genre in film. Sweetback’s multi-hyphenate writer-director-producer-composer-star, Melvin Van Peebles, stormed onto Broadway, that “Great White Way,” with not one but two musicals depicting contemporary black life for white and black audiences: Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death and Don’t Play Us Cheap. With these two shows, Van Peebles changed the look, sound, content, and audience that had typically come to define successful Broadway musicals, and by extension American musical theatre itself. With his vision of black life on “the Block” in Ain’t Supposed to Die, Melvin Van Peebles brought the contemporary aesthetics of black creative expression to Broadway, and made it a success with the show ultimately running for 325 performances, earning a number of Tony Award nominations including Best Musical and Best Original Score. Despite Van Peebles’s success with Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, though, the aesthetic intervention into musical theatre was short-lived, as politically conscious musicals were gone from Broadway as early as 1975.