Paradise Square, a new musical, will debut on Broadway at the beginning of 2022. A creative team including choreographer Bill T. Jones craft a tale of the tenuous existence of those who inhabited Manhattan’s infamous Five Points neighborhood in 1863. : @blktheatronline
Irish immigrants and African Americans both free born and self-emancipated via the Underground Railroad inhabited five Points. The two ethnic groups, both considered barely on the social scale, established a community bound together through intermarriage and cultural exchange. Traditional music and dance, juba and step dancing, blended and together and created new musical forms. Tap dancing is said to have begun here.
Five Points was so named because it was located where a trio of intersecting streets, Anthony, Cross and Orange, formed five corners. In early colonial times Collect Pond covered the area. In the 1770s the polluted pond was drained into the Hudson River. When the land was reclaimed cheap wooden houses were constructed and the marginalized, poor, downtrodden and criminal began to populate the area. It was the location of the city’s first free black settlement. These factors were a perfect equation for the proliferation of gangs.
The Civil War was a defining moment for Five Points and would destabilize the neighborhood and put an end to the harmonious existence between the Irish and the African Americans. Lincoln established the first Federal Draft. The poor had to serve but there was a $300 exemption fee ($6,000 today) that only the wealthy could afford. African Americans as non-citizens were exempt from the draft. The Irish were incensed and initially turned on the elite but their anger quickly pivoted and targeted blacks. The New York Draft Riots raged for four nights in July of 1863 until 4,000 federal troops arrived. It is estimated that more than 1,000 blacks were killed.
Paradise Square is a musical drama that presents social history as a snapshot of a time when racial harmony appeared possible and the circumstances that altered life as they knew it.
Support Black Theater and get tickets as soon as they go on sale.
View a promotional video: https://youtu.be/EfKq5O9Hwrs
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