The Sensational Josephine Baker

How did Freda Josephine McDonald become The Sensational Josephine Baker? It was not due to her exceptional singing voice, graceful dancing or great beauty. Baker was actually tall and scrawny with buckteeth and an elastic face that twisted into comedic contortions. Her limbs flew about with abandon and her voice was aggressive. What she did have was a fierce personality and inner drive that made her the toast of Paris in the years between the wars. Josephine Baker became one of America’s most charismatic entertainers, a woman rejected by her own country but wildly appreciated internationally. This, however, does not tell the whole story.

Directed by Ian Streicher, Cheryl Howard bio-musical begins on the opening night of Baker’s last performance. It is April 8, 1975 at the Bobino Theatre in Paris and it is her comeback show. Baker’s best days are behind her and she is distraught, in desperate need of money and overwhelmed by memories of her past. Against a backdrop of David Bengali’s video projections and numerous costume adjustments, Howard flashbacks chronologically through her life, back to when Baker was a hyperkinetic, awkward child fascinated with the stage and its promises of riches and glamour.

While still a teenager, Baker gets a job as a dresser in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s revue, Shuffle Along. Rejected as a dancer for the show because she is “too skinny and too dark,” the intrepid Baker studies the dance moves, and when one of the dancers suddenly leaves, she finagles her way into the chorus line. A natural scene-stealer, she attracts attention with gawky moves and by crossing her eyes. She grabs every chance to move ahead, soon landing in New York and finally in La Revue Nègre in Paris where dancing semi-nude in her flimsy skirts, she becomes a star.

In the one-and-a-half hour show, Howard evokes a parade of colorful characters from Baker’s life, her abusive mother, an encouraging grandmother, a selfish husband and legendary expatriates like Ada “Bricktop” Smith, who ran a famed Paris nightclub. Bricktop gives Baker advice on love and was probably one of Baker’s lovers but Howard’s most detailed evocation is Lydia Jones, an embittered ex-chorus girl, with pithy comments about the black Chitlin Circuit and Josephine Baker. “She had balls; she was born to be a star, I guess… She stepped on anyone’s shoulders to get wherever she wanted to go.”

Howard does not resemble Josephine Baker physically, but she is adept with humor, frenzied dancing and delivering some of Baker’s trademark songs like “J’ai Deux Amours” and “Don’t Touch Me Tomato” with authority. Loren Van Brenk wrote some additional songs like, “Eighty-Three Million Francs,” “Find Your Voice,” and “My Paris,” but the recorded musical accompaniment is bland and a detriment.