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The Scottsboro Boys: Theater Review

4:46 PM PDT 10/31/2010 by David Rooney

NEW YORK -- It takes an audacious creative team to adopt the minstrel show, one of the most inherently racist forms in the history of popular American entertainment, as the frame for a searing story of Jim Crow-era injustice. But John Kander and Fred Ebb never have shied away from challenging material.

These are the songwriters who brought their brassy, neo-Brechtian high style to the rise of Nazism in Cabaret, the defilement of justice and celebrification of criminals in Chicago and the grim squalor of prison life in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Those musicals and their themes are echoed with dazzling craftsmanship in The Scottsboro Boys, one of a handful of projects in the works when Ebb died in 2004.

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    'Pippin' Sneak Peek

    Diane Paulus directs the circus-themed Broadway revival of 'Pippin,' the 1972 musical by Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson.

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