When Melvin Van Peebles died last autumn, he was rightly remembered as a firebrand film-maker and the godfather of blaxploitation and independent cinema. His stage career as a theatre director, playwright, composer and lyricist is less well documented – mind you, so are his other lives as a novelist, painter and Wall Street trader.
In 1971, in the wake of his explosively successful low-budget film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Van Peebles made his Broadway debut with a “ghetto-life” musical, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. He wrote its music, book and lyrics and the following year, ever the multi-hyphenate, he did the same for a second Broadway musical, Don’t Play Us Cheap. But this time he also produced and directed. The two shows ran concurrently in the summer of 1972, and that year he released a film version of Don’t Play Us Cheap starring the original Broadway cast. It’s now available in a Blu-ray Van Peebles box set from Criterion.
Anyone who only knows Van Peebles for the brutal and bleak Sweetback may be surprised by the abundant warmth of Don’t Play Us Cheap, and also by its sheer goofiness. This is a musical with a prologue told by actors dressed up as a rat and a cockroach and a plot that finds two “devil bats” visiting Harlem and assuming human form to wreck a house party. But against this wacky backdrop, Van Peebles presents a close-knit circle of friends and family: “brothers and sisters getting their groove on” as the intro has it, which brings to mind how the opening sequence for Sweetback listed the main stars as “the black community”.
Sweetback’s tale of a hustler on the run was propelled by a jazz-funk score by Earth, Wind and Fire (released on Stax Records) and by Van Peebles’ own defiant musical refrain: “They bled your momma. They bled your poppa. Won’t bleed me.” Don’t Play Us Cheap has a stirring and more expansive mix of R&B, soul, jazz, doo-wop and blues. These songs are not used to move along plot or fill out characterisation in a traditional sense. Instead they collectively form a portrait of the time and place: a Saturday night in Harlem in the early 70s, where Earnestine (Rhetta Hughes) is celebrating her 20th birthday.
Unlike musicals whose characters break seamlessly from book into song, Van Peebles has his characters directly discuss the tunes that form the soundtrack. We even see them selecting and spinning the records we hear – an act that invites us to listen more carefully to the lyrics. The film comes alive when Mrs Washington (played by Joshie Jo Armstead, a former Ikette turned soloist and songwriter) hears the opening bars to You Cut Up the Clothes in the Closet of My Dreams. “Ooh that’s it! That’s my song,” she declares, pouring herself a drink and rising from the sofa to deliver the ballad of heartbreak and recovery. Van Peebles gradually frames her in a tight close-up, the other house guests serving first as her audience and then as her chorus of backing singers.
“I’m moving on” is a recurring line in that song and in the film itself, which is a hymn to endurance and going high, and celebrates a carefree night when you put the week’s work behind you, forget your worries and simply savour the next dish coming out of the kitchen. Van Peebles tells this tale of a circle of intergenerational family and friends through styles such as gospel and soul that are equally closely related. And the bonds of music are shown to be unbreakable: literally so when Joe Keyes Jr, as Trinity, sits on a pile of records but they don’t snap.
Trinity is one of the devil bats who flap into this party with the same tricksy visual effects such as distortion and superimposition that Van Peebles used in Sweetback. But Esther Rolle, as the matriarch Miss Maybell, is hardly freaked out to find Trinity – clad in black and red, with cape and jutting lapels – in her apartment. And in a hot minute Earnestine has fallen for him.
If there’s little chemistry between Hughes and Keyes Jr, Rolle has loving wisdom to spare and Miss Maybell gives the film its heart. Earthly ills from jealousy and suspicion to snobbery and hypocrisy are denounced while she exudes a generosity of spirit. “Everybody falls sometimes,” she observes. “The trick is to get back up.” Despite the bats’ best efforts to ruin it, the spirit of the party – just like those records – is unbreakable.
After the arrival of another suitor along with a second devil bat named David, there’s not much more plot to bother with. Van Peebles’ film has the disjointed feel of a real party – a carousel of distractions and interruptions, snippets of conversation and jokes. It’s punctuated with rollicking piano lines, call-and-response, hand claps and dance routines that are authentic rather than overly choreographed. But if the feel is largely celebratory, and the whole bat plot fantastical, the story is also grounded in social commentary and politics: our rat host asks “are you hip to injustice?” in the prologue, Miss Maybell reflects on the “lying and killing” in the world beyond her triple-locked front door, and on her wall are photos of Malcolm X and of Martin Luther King whose assassinations were still reverberating in early-70s America.
The apartment is filled with photos of other African American icons such as Isaac Hayes, on the album cover of Black Moses, and Van Peebles himself, on the cover of his LP As Serious As a Heart-Attack. Don’t Play Us Cheap earned Van Peebles a Tony nomination for best book and also brought actor Avon Long a nomination for his performance as David. The show ran for 164 performances; Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death managed almost double that number. But it would be years until Van Peebles directed or wrote another major film or stage musical. None of his four theatre productions have had a Broadway revival although there are plans to bring back Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death this year, with Van Peebles’ son Mario involved. But Don’t Play Us Cheap, even with the film’s dated visual effects and uneven comedy, is an irresistible soul-saver of a musical. It deserves its own 50th birthday party on stage.
