GOLDEN DAWN stage play: Is there more to it than just racism?
Posted just in case anyone reads this board...
I haven't actually seen the whole movie, but I've read the libretto on the NYPL's Musical of the Month blog channel.
Aside from the overt racism, the setting's just bizarre and tasteless. What were Hammerstein/Harbach thinking when they decided that a comic opera set in a WWI prisoner-of-war camp in East Africa was a good idea?
The biggest racist assumption in the script is the implication that blood will tell ---- Dawn's dislike for Shep Keyes is at least partly due to her being white.*
When I talk about GOLDEN DAWN with any of my friends and classmates in uni they always say pretty much the same things; "Oh my god, that's so racist!" or "Oh my God, that's so bad!"
But I think there's a bit more to it than just the racism. Hammerstein and Harbach also give the most significant black characters in the show some depth. Mooda has a song about her heartbreak when Dawn's father left her to marry Dawn's biological mother.
When Shep is trying to convince Dawn to be his mistress he says:
Ain't it always de way of de white man? Dey takes what dey wants from us blacks an' den gives us a kick ---- it's de way of 'em all ovah de world--- but worse heah in Africa dan anywah else.
IMVHO those lines sound like a commentary on Jim Crow and segregation. Some reviewers in 1927 saw Shep as a slightly sympathetic character.
Also, the plot reminds me a bit of an African version of Boucicault's The Octoroon, with a villainous overseer lusting after the innocent heroine, except that here the overseer's black and the girl's white. I recently handed in an American history essay on that one.
*that's how I see it. All the Europeans in the play get along --- during World War I! share