Local history: Al Jolson delighted Akron

The act hasn’t aged well. Audiences would find it offensive today, but Al Jolson’s blackface routine was a smash hit in Akron.

Jolson, a Broadway star and recording artist billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer,” was 37 years old when he strolled into town for a sold-out performance at Goodyear Theater on Thursday, Feb. 7, 1924.

New York theater owners Lee and Jacob Shubert presented the national tour of the Broadway show “Bombo,” a two-act musical whose famous songs included “California, Here I Come,” “April Showers,” “Give Me My Mammy,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “Don’t Cry, Swanee” and “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face.”

Akron tickets cost $3.50 for orchestra seats (about $53.50 today) and ranged from $1 to $3 for balcony seats ($15 to $46 today). There was standing room only on the night of the show.

Jolson donned burnt cork makeup, a black wig, white gloves and flashy costumes for the production, which alternated settings between 1924 and 1492. In the musical, he portrayed Gus, his famous character from minstrel shows, and Bombo, a servant of Christopher Columbus.

Standard for the times, the garish makeup, ethnic humor and stereotypical dialects were racially insensitive to say the least, but Jolson was a dynamic performer with a charismatic stage presence. He charmed the Akron audience from the start, taking tickets at the front door in character and then excusing himself to begin the show.

“Finding his audience in a responsive mood — almost hysterical in its laughter with his comedy, deafening in its applause with both his new and old song hits — Jolson became one of the crowd, remaining with his patrons almost continuously from the first appearance even until after the final curtain,” the Akron Times reported.

Much to the delight of patrons, Jolson ad-libbed several jokes about Akron’s transportation crisis. The Northern Ohio Traction & Light Co. had suspended streetcar service Feb. 1 in a fare dispute after Mayor D.C. Rybolt and the City Council refused to allow the company to raise its rate from 5 cents a ride to 7 cents.

Unable to take streetcars, the audience had to find other ways to get to the show, and Jolson made them laugh at their predicament.

“They laughed when he came strutting from the wings,” the Beacon Journal reported. “They laughed when he made capital of the absence of streetcars. In fact that was one of the chief Jolson lines. Not once, but on many occasions he rocked the audience with ‘fast ones’ on the local transportation situation.”

As far as the crowd was concerned, Jolson could do no wrong. They laughed at just about anything he said or did.

“You must have laughed when you bought your tickets,” Jolson told them.

“Bombo” featured a 150-member troupe, including “the comely, youthful” Wainwright sisters: Madge Mary and Muriel; leading ladies Janet Adair, Arline Gardiner and Jeanne Kay (“all easy to look upon, acceptable in both song and dance”); and leading men Harold Carne, Harry Turpin, Frank Holmes and Harry Sievers (“an excellent supporting cast”).

The new songs made an impression.

“California, here I come,” Jolson sang. “Right back where I started from.”

“Dirty hands! Dirty face!” Jolson sang. “Leads the neighbors a chase. But his smile is as cute as can be.”

“Toot, toot, Tootsie, goodbye!” Jolson sang. “Toot, toot, Tootsie, don’t cry.”

And as he liked to say: “You ain’t heard nothing yet.”

In addition to the new tunes in “Bombo,” Jolson sang a medley of some of his most famous songs, “Swanee,” “My Mammy” and “You Made Me Love You” presumably among them.

“He spurned the usual rest so sought by stage stars between acts and during most of the intermission, sang, told stories or just chatted with his Akron friends,” the Akron Times reported.

Jolson worked the first act in blackface and removed the burnt cork with cold cream, performing the second half au naturel. “It proved an interesting study for theater patrons and showed just how little makeup really has to do after all with the success of a real artist,” the newspaper noted.

The entertainer didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave.

“I’ll stay here just as long as you will,” he told the audience.

He sang. He danced.

The crowd laughed.

It was nearly midnight when Jolson took a final bow at the Goodyear Theater.

“If I have a single one night stand next season, I’m going to visit Akron again,” he told the crowd.

As the Beacon Journal concluded its review: “A Jolson show, especially such a show as he gave here last night, helps fill in the long gap between Akron and Broadway.”

Jolson never returned to the Akron stage. Three years after visiting, he made history as the star of “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first talking motion picture.

He died of a heart attack in October 1950 at age 64 after returning from a trip to Korea, where he had entertained U.S. troops.

Over the decades, American audiences increasingly objected to blackface comedians and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, drawing the final curtain on the burnt cork era, although minstrel shows inexplicably continued to be staged locally into the 1970s.

Times change, people change, standards change.

As Al Jolson said in Akron: “I’ll stay here just as long as you will.”

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3850.