I reminded Clementine of the Merce Cunningham videos that we’d watched at the Andy Warhol Museum, and tried to put the whole thing into historical context, but I think I did a pretty pathetic job of explaining why it is that, in 1954, Irving Berlin, and the people who made White Christmas, would want to divert from their storyline in order to critique modern dance. Santa & The Dance Squad on Amazon Music. This action, dance & camp song is a hit with kids of all ages! Enjoy our Christmas songs. I suspect that I’m right, but I don’t know. The movie on its face has the same problems as most films of its era: it was made by white people for a white audience and carried with it the inherent racism of Hollywood and its time. Well, that was before he had ever heard of talking pictures or contemplated Al Jolson (who gets a shoutout in White Christmas) singing about a “Mamie” on screen, but blackface and minstrelry were part of his cultural vocabulary so much even then that he wrote several numbers for his all-soldier army revue that were either about or influenced by minstrel shows and one of those songs was “Mandy” and the so-called “Minstrel Number” that eventually made it into White Christmas nearly four decades later. Boots reboot… Here’s what happened a week ago tonight, when Boots Riley and The Coup liberated Ypsilanti, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTWN8apuA8, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=543803, 106 members of Congress are guilty of sedition, Florida ramps up the negligent homicide bodycount in the run-up to the GOP convention. White Christmas (1954) was the first film photographed in Paramount's widescreen VistaVision process. âWhite Christmas â I just laugh so hard at the choreography Dance. I’ve never smoked and would have an asthma attack after about 10 seconds of hopping around like him. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=543803. The Ypsilanti Public Library has Holiday Inn, though at this time of year you’ll be waiting a while for it. I’ll have to see if I can convince her to tell the story someday. While it is performed each holiday season, it seems to get an unusual amount of attention from the military. The way “Blue Skies” sounds, according to musical historians, was clearly “Jewish” to many listeners in the 20s, but it still became a hit. sings a verse to her kids…in the kitchen. There is no comparison on film. Every movie and song and piece of art has a story, it’s not always merry and bright. One of many army-centric numbers repurposed for White Christmas. I wasn’t expecting, when Clementine and I set out to watch White Christmas this evening, that I’d find myself delivering an impromptu, barely comprehensible lecture on modern dance… I know that I’d seen the movie before, but I had absolutely no memory whatsoever of this incredibly out-of-place little scene featuring Danny Kaye and half a dozen painfully serious young women in drab, utilitarian dresses, who look as though they were plucked right off the streets of Leningrad. Many of the army related songs we hear in the show are from the same revue – called Yip Yip Yaphank – that “Mandy” comes from while others are repurposed from the 1943 movie Holiday Inn, where the song “White Christmas” was first heard on screen. 15 Things You Didn't Know About "White Christmas" Some trivia about the 1954 Christmas classic ( now streaming on Netflix !) Interesting! The dancers are fine. Ah! I’ll check it out. The same goes for “Blue Skies” which is just a brief song we here in a montage. Explicitly and textually it’s not racist…but that’s only because there are no black people in it aside from one bartender in the club car in the “Snow” scene. That this is still talked about in and of itself speaks to her talent and versatility. The original St. Louis production starred Lara Teeter, Karen Mason, Lauren Kennedy, and Lee Roy Reams, and the 2004 San Francisco production starred Brian D'Arcy James, Anastasia Barzee, Meredith Patterson, and Jeffry Denman We actually hear “Abraham” only in an instrumental version as Vera Ellen dances her tail off. He came up in the teens, garnering success as a songwriter and served in the army, writing songs for all-soldier revues during World War I (we’ll come back to that). Raised the son of a synagogue cantor, Jewish music was a huge influence on his early life and music. First, a detour. With Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen. General Waverly's Columbia Inn in fictional Pine Tree, Vermont, made it's debut a decade before, in Holiday Inn. If you ask me what movie I put on first thing in December to get in the holiday spirit I’ll tell you right away that it’s White Christmas. Read the original review. Holiday Inn is a 1942 American musical film directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, with Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale, and Walter Abel. White Christmas ties directly into Hollywood’s checkered history with blackface, minstrel shows and the complicated legacy of one of America’s greatest songwriters: Irving Berlin. Thanks for the great stories and “go Clementine ” I read somewhere that Danny Kaye smoked like 5 packs of cigarettes a day yet could still shake his ass like that (not saying it’s *great* dancing but that it’s very active). It was during the Abe Lincoln song, right? We still live with minstrel relics in our culture – White Christmas being just one of them. The song White Christmas was written by Irving Berlin and was first recorded and released by Bing Crosby with Ken Darby Singers and John Scott Trotter and His Orchestra in 1942. No one likes a bragger, Peter “I’m Mostly White” Larson. Irving Berlin, the composer of “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” was a Jewish, Russian immigrant who came to America when he was only a child. I love Holiday Inn too (although the black face scene does make me cringe). Robert Alton is actually credited with being the choreographer (Dance Director) for White Christmas. White Christmas is a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film of the same name.The book is by David Ives and Paul Blake, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “The only thing is,” she said, “I don’t know if I could keep my face like Wednesday Addams for that long.” I told her that, during practice, you were probably allowed to smile, and that it was just during performances that you were required to look suicidal. Or to keep it anonymous, click here. I don’t know if Irving Berlin knew or felt that blackface was racist at the time, because The Jazz Singer wasn’t Irving Berlin’s first or last interaction with blackface and the larger minstrel tradition it arose from. KKT, seriously? And thanks for the link, ATF. I told Clementine that I thought it spoke to the fact that there were warring factions within the theater community at the time. I was searching all over to find the name of White Christmas (1954) - ⦠even more utilitarian and powerful. But is that okay? Holiday Inn stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and is about a hotel that’s only open on Holidays (which seems dumb) and they start scraping the barrel for holiday songs really fast. With dancer and wife, Tybee Arfa (1932â1982) , he formed the dance team Brascia and Tybee , which, beginning in 1957, began appearing as the opening act for artists like Frank Sinatra , Lena Horne , Tony Martin and George Burns , among others. 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