Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed a musical written and directed by George C. Wolfe, with songs by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, at the Music Box Theatre, New York City, opened on April 28, 2016
In the arts big changes are often wrought not by the person who introduced the new thing but, sadly, by a person who came after, and copied it, and, thanks to greater luck or talent, made of it something that a lot of other people, too, wanted to try, thus creating an entire style or tradition, rich and various and streaked with different tastes, different sensibilities. It is now widely known, but once wasn’t, that the interior monologue technique that so many twentieth-century novelists proudly…