[Harry Belafonte, Alvin Ailey, Mary Hinkson] Sing, Man, Sing! at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Brooklyn: Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1956. 7 x 10 ¼ in. Offset. Single sheet folded to produce 4 page program.

A rare program from Harry Belafonte’s musical, Sing, Man, Sing! performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1956, with dancing from the groundbreaking choreographer Alvin Ailey, with Mary Hinkson.

Sing, Man, Sing! was written and produced by the lifelong activist and performer Belafonte with his manager, Jay Richard Kennedy and produced the same year as Belafonte’s breakout studio album, Calypso. The musical did not finish its run and artifacts from this important early work by Belafonte remain scarce.

The small cast included several titans of the midcentury stage: Alvin Ailey, the queer performer and choreographer whose work fused theater, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with black vernacular; the dancer and choreographer, Mary Hinkson, and the opera star Margaret Tynes.

Notably, Belafonte’s manager and co-producer, Kennedy, a liberal and avowed anti-communist, was reportedly an informant for the CIA by the mid 1960s.

Faint fold lines and small discoloration from adhesive to third and fourth pages, not obstructing text. Overall, very good. A superb artifact of Black performance in the twentieth century.