How The Apollo Theater Became America's Most Important Venue

#TheApolloTheater #Harlem #AmateurNight 

Long before Randy Jackson's it’s-a-no-from-me-dawged judging on American Idol, and those spinning chairs on The Voice decided the futures of intrepid crooners, there was the weekly Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Beginning a little over 80 years ago, it's the longest running talent show in the world, where acts come from across the country to compete for the admiration of the Apollo’s notoriously hard-to-please crowd. The stakes? If you beat everyone out, you join a list of other winners such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and the Jackson 5. And if the theater doesn’t like you, you’re booed (like hemorrhaging-sports-fan-booed), and swept off the stage by a guy called “the executioner.” Yeah, it’s a little more damaging than a Simon Cowell scowl.

Though, as it is with the few other American venues that share the Apollo’s history and cultural perma-relevance, it’s a tradition. A proud one, too—even Jimi Hendrix had one of his earliest breakout performances at Amateur Night. And finally, after over a century since the Apollo first claimed its home in Harlem, New York, HBO gave it the documentary treatment, which is set to air tonight at 9 p.m. ET. The whole film—from each interview to the modern-day footage HBO captured for the movie—bursts with Be Kind, Rewind-esque heart, the kind of energy that comes when a community makes a testament to the place they love.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams, The Apollo weaves in the theater’s recent stage adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me with a cover-to-cover, jukebox-heavy telling of the venue’s long history. And it’s quite a story, told through interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Patti LaBelle, Smokey Robinson, Paul McCartney, and more. Back in the 1910s, architect George Keister built the 1,500-capacity Hurtig & Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater in Harlem—which was actually closed to African-American patrons until it became the Apollo under new ownership in 1934.

James Brown performs with The Famous Flames

Starting with jazz legend Adelaide Hall’s performance in Chocolate Soldiers, the Apollo quickly became a landmark place for up-and-coming (and later, established) African-American performers to play in the country, from the jazz age to hip-hop's arrival. The Apollo shows footage of glorious, hall-of-fame performances from the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, to the era of Lauryn Hill and Public Enemy, all the way up to recent concerts from Common and Pharrell. And not to mention, some stand-up spots along the way, like Richard Pryor. And the archival footage in The Apollo is flooring, considering the venue was once home to a young Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin.

The Apollo shows, too, how the stage became a racial-barrier-breaking space throughout its existence. Billie Holiday once sang her revolutionary "Strange Fruit" at the Apollo, which depicts a hanging in the South, not too long after the theater was a whites-only space. When James Brown performed, “Say it Loud (I’m Black and Proud)” in 1968, it was read as an anthem for African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. The Apollo’s place as a home to African-American performers was so strong that even the mere act of The Beatles swinging past the venue in 1964 (when race relations were especially poor, too) incited mass loathing from residents. And in 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to speak at the theater—greeting the crowd with his signature charm, singing a bit of an Al Green song.

Through the footage of actors preparing for the Between the World and Me stage show, The Apollo shows how those involved with the theater constantly examine issues facing African-Americans in this country today, and make sure that conversation makes it to the stage. You see them deliberating the delivery of every word Coates wrote. And when we see the performance, it’s especially affecting—considering that Williams cuts the show alongside footage reminding us that that same Apollo stage was once home to vaudeville shows where performers performed in blackface.

So yes, The Apollo is a get-up-and-dance story about a small group of people working in a theater in upper Manhattan, doing its best to bring music to its neighborhood—which is beautiful enough on its own. But, Williams also drives home how this is more than a theater—one that has a larger place in American history as a stage for social change.

BY BRADY LANGMANN -NOV 6, 2019