Gotham City Soul

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes. So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction” . Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in a...

In 1936 a 21-year old Orson Welles directed a stage version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The cast was all-black, and the setting was Haiti, not Scotland. It was mounted with money from the Federal Theater Project, which had helped set up black theater projects throughout the country. He got paid $50 a week, much less than what he got in his job as radio announcer. I'm going to borrow from the author and history professor Joshua Zeitz, who wrote an article about the production: "The cast and crew of Harlem's Macbeth were a diverse assemblage of experienced and inexperienced characters whose convergence on the Lafayette Theatre only contributed to the considerable amount of rumor swirling around the production. For the troupe's choreographer, Welles chose a a Sierra Leonean percussion expert. Asodata Dafora Horton, who coordinated the drumming and chanting that accompanied the drama, performed by dancers from the west coast of Africa. Their leader was a genuine witch ...