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.
