Lack of authenticity is not the reason. Its score was written by white men but so were the scores of “Purlie” and “Dreamgirls.” A lack of flash may have been a factor: “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” are spectacles, as much about costumes and dancing as how they sound. But “Purlie” is about a few people in a couple of rooms talking about problems, just like “Raisin.”
A likely reason “Raisin” isn’t much revived is a sense that a play as important as Lorraine Hansberry’s should be preserved as it was, that setting it to music is intrusive or at least unnecessary. Ethan Mordden, a historian of musical theater whom I hold in the very highest esteem, wrote: “The songs are finely judged. But they add nothing to what Hansberry wrote. They are what Hansberry wrote; that’s the trouble.”
People said the same about turning “Pygmalion” into “My Fair Lady.” I myself view Hansberry’s play as something close to scripture, but the musical pulls off some things that the play cannot. In the play, the little boy, Travis, can usually make only so much of an impression because the acting ability of kids that age is often limited (although the first person to play that role was Glynn Thurman, the now celebrated veteran actor, and he was probably excellent). In the musical, however, Travis gets a captivating little song called “Sidewalk Tree” and comes across to us vividly. “He Come Down This Morning” gives us the Younger family singing in church, a central aspect of their weekly existence that the play, without music, can’t deliver. And while “A Raisin in the Sun” unwittingly initiated a genre that George C. Wolfe affectionately dissed, in “The Colored Museum,” as the “Mama-on-the-couch play,” “Raisin”’s music for the mother, Lena, — especially the unjustly neglected ballad “Measure the Valleys” — transcends any cliché.
“Raisin” is also special in being about Black people just having conversations. Clearing the table, standing around, answering the doorbell. Most Black musicals are about performers, flash, funk, scarecrows, witches, the Supremes or something like them, silvery gleaming, yellow brick, bluesy numbers that raise the roof. All great. But in the warm duet “Sweet Time,” “Raisin” has what may be the first Broadway song in which a Black couple simply converse with each other rather than proclaim and prance for the audience.
“A Raisin in the Sun” is certainly one of the best plays ever written in the English language. There is a reason it has been revived on Broadway not once but twice in the 21st century alone, as well as once Off Broadway, and is often done by regional and community theater groups. (I think I have seen it seven times.) However, it is increasingly distant from us in time. It was valued in 1959 as giving white theatergoers their first sustained look into Black life, but they have had many more such looks since. Housing segregation still exists, but not in the overt form of the covenants that the play so searingly depicts. Ambivalence about assimilation to white ways persists among many Black people, but the color line is not what it was. Today if Black people assimilate, it’s to a whiteness that is no longer as pure as it was in the 1950s, having been transformed by the “browning” of the culture.
