Gotta Sing? Gotta Dance? : Is American theater relegating blacks to musicals set in less enlightened times and places?

\f7 --C. Bernard Jackson, executive director Inner City Cultural Center

In 1821, an audacious group of theater artists formed New York's African Company, the first African-American stage troupe on record in the United States. Nearly 170 years later, the spiritual descendants of those thespian pioneers are still singin' and dancin' to please the powers that be.

With a slew of period African-American musicals having come out over the past decade--and a new crop just beginning to hit the Southern California boards, starting with last week's opening of "Blues in the Night" at the Los Angeles Theater Center--some professionals argue that today's African-American stage artists are still being kept down on the farm.

Despite putative advances toward "cultural diversity," African-Americans still compete for relatively few, often stereotypical roles. There's a dearth of African-American dramas on stage--almost none that address the current plight of this segment of the U.S. population--and nearly all of the fare that does make it to major venues consistently relegates African-Americans to another place and time.

"As we move into the 1990s, there's a backlash of racism," says actor-writer-director Shabaka, leader of LATC's Black Theater Artists' Workshop. "The (societal) situation is far worse than it was 10 years ago. You don't see that on American stages. That's what has to be seen."

"The age-old stereotypes are still prevalent," says Floyd Gaffney, chair of UC San Diego's Contemporary Black Arts Program and coordinator of a UCSD conference concluding today on "Cultural Diversity in the American Theatre."

"Blacks are known to sing and dance. Music will sell. Mostly what (these musicals) are talking about has nothing to do with the problems we face."

Besides LATC's current West Coast premiere of Sheldon Epps' "Blues in the Night," a musical set in the '30s, in January, the San Diego Repertory Theater will offer the world premiere of Amiri Baraka's "The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson," set in the Harlem Renaissance, and in February, the Mark Taper Forum presents George C. Wolfe's "Mr. Jellylord," about the seminal jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton.

Currently on Broadway is a David Merrick revival of the George and Ira Gershwin musical 'Oh, Kay!" featuring an all-African-American cast. New York Times critic Frank Rich said the production--set in jazz-age Harlem--seems like "a minstrel show," and refers to "eye-popping gags and stereotypes that are less redolent of the Cotton Club than of 'Amos 'n' Andy.' "

And there are more period works on the way. The La Jolla Playhouse recently won a $40,000 AT&T grant for a new Eric Overmyer play with music called "The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin."

These productions and projects follow a pack of stage works--"Bubblin' Brown Sugar," "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grille," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Black and Blue," "Shout Up a Morning," "Further Mo'," "Mama, I Want to Sing (I and II)," "The Wiz," "Dreamgirls" and many others that filled New York and regional houses during the '80s. They are all musicals or plays with music and they are all set in the past, the majority of them in the 1920s to 1940s.

Most of them are also pointedly apolitical. "Dreamgirls," for instance, chronicled the rise of a '60s girl group a la the Supremes with virtually no mention of the social upheaval of the decade.

This retro-boom also extends to the non-musical theater. With dramas, the dominant voice of the '80s was two-time Pulitzer winner August Wilson, whose cycle of five plays--"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "The Piano Lesson" and "Two Trains Running"--all take place in earlier decades.

Nor is this dated presence of African-Americans onstage limited to new works. Facing increased pressure from granting sources to meet affirmative-action goals for hiring nonwhite performers, opera companies from New York to California are trotting out in record numbers "Porgy and Bess," "Cabin in the Sky" and "Showboat"--the latter staged earlier this year by Opera Pacific in Orange County.

"Many of us had hoped these shows were all dead and gone," says one member of a national funding organization who asked to remain anonymous. "The problem with major companies doing these shows is that it gives these musicals a validation they didn't used to have. The biggest statement in 'Showboat' is, 'Here we all work while the white folks play.' "

"White audiences obviously feel very comfortable with these works," says Inner City Cultural Center executive director C. Bernard Jackson, referring to both the newer musicals and the revivals.