- Performances: 1,065
- Open / Close: April 19, 1972 – October 27, 1974
- Theater: Opened at the Playhouse Theatre, moved to the Edison after two months.
- Tony Awards: Nominated for 4 including Best Musical but no wins. It did win two Drama Desk awards, however, both for Micki Grant (Outstanding Performance & Most Promising Lyricist).
- Fun Fact: The longest running show ever at the Edison was also a musical revue, the revival of “Oh! Calcutta.”
Podcast
Yes, Dr. T is on the Pod! The esteemed and amazing Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates talks about the little-known show that inspired her groundbreaking work in theater. And our conversation might just have inspired her to take action on getting a revival produced!
Some Broadway hits are so steeped in lore it’s hard to trim down the available material to a reasonable recap. This show is not one of those.
article about her in Ebony magazine.
“Don’t Bother Me” broke barriers for sure: it was the first Broadway show directed by a black woman (Vinnette Carroll) and the first written entirely by a woman (Micki Grant, who also starred in the original production). But, while popular enough in its time, it was hard to find a modern day theater historian talking about an enduring legacy. That might be because of racism. But also: maybe it wasn’t that great of a show.
- Fun Fact: Micki Grant first gained fame starring as a lawyer on the soap opera, “Another World.” Her character was never killed off just in case the actress decided to come back after developing “Don’t Bother Me.” She never did. (More details in this piece from Ebony.)
Perhaps more accurately, this was a show that gained a lot of power from its immediate relevance. As Grant remembered while helping prepare a recent City Center Encores! production of the show, “When it first started, I would change it all the time based on what was going on in the news.” The Encores! production got some updates but Grant never produced a wholesale refresh. It’s inevitable that some material seems anachronistic today. It’s also sad that a lot of it is just as vital and relevant.
As Grant recounts, she “wanted to come at [the issues] with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” Today, that means some songs like the title tune bury legitimately angry sentiments in bouncy, cheerful melodies, a discordance that comes across more like compromise than strategy. The more nakedly pedantic “They Keep Coming” certainly states its case but with all the subtlety of a nursery rhyme.
The show didn’t win any Tonys, but the cast album won a Grammy (you can listen to the whole thing on YouTube). If you’re like me, you’ll get plenty pumped up by revivalistic gospel-inflected songs like “Good Vibrations.” But the most fascinating and smart aspects of the whole album to me are the interstitial remarks included in “Time Brings About a Change.” One singer talks about punching a white kid in the nose after being called “black” when “negro” was the acceptable term. In the next lines, a woman says that her brother got punched in the nose saying “negro” after “black” comes into vogue.
- Sad Fact: Grant’s father died the day before the show’s first preview on Broadway.
There are all sorts of interesting rabbit holes you can wander down related to this show. Arnold Wilkerson starred in the original off-Broadway production of “Hair” as well as in “Don’t Bother Me” but eventually focused on his talent for baking, opening the Little Pie Company. Another original cast member, Alex Bradford, had a storied career as a gospel performer before “Don’t Bother Me.” In the wake of Little Richard’s recent death, many obituaries have mentioned how many performers imitated him. It’s interesting then to read that performers from Little Richard to Ray Charles emulated Bradford.
- Fun Fact: As this site works its way up the list of long-runners, this is the first “musical revue.” Depending on how you want to split hairs, there are 10 revues on the list with “Oh! Calcutta!” being the longest running. Revues starring African-American performers had a well-established popularity in the earlier days of Broadway with shows like “Hot Chocolates” drawing significant crowds.
some disdain for the lack of apostrophes…
Critics generally enjoyed “Don’t Bother Me,” though the characterization of the show as “a mixture of a block party and a revival meeting” in the original New York Times review and echoed again for the Encores! Revival doesn’t exactly scream “satisfying theatrical experience.” And others looking back, have been less charitable. In “The Complete Book of 1970s Broadway Musicals,” the author cites complaints that the show never had a clear, underlying theme and suggested that listening to the cast album was preferable to seeing the show. In the wake of a show like “Hair” that broke through the zeitgeist a few years earlier, some concluded that the show was “more than a little patronizing.”
I found myself circling back to some telling lyrics at the beginning of the song “My Name is Man:” I’ve been around for centuries and you don’t know me yet. With sentiments like that, “Don’t Bother Me” plays like an introduction. In the almost 50 years since, I think (hope!) theater artists and audiences have moved beyond introductions and can confidently explore a black experiences with more depth and complexity than “Don’t Bother Me” offers.
- Final Grade: B+.
The York Theatre produced a tribute to Micki Grant in 2016. Below is a performance from that production.