Dancing in the Dark

With George Guidall's track record, all that need be said about this recording is that he is well matched to the material and performs at his usual level. Guidall is one of the industry's finest storytellers. Author Kaminsky gives the storyteller a lot to work with: an idiosyncratic first-person narrator who encounters a colorful range of secondary characters in the course of a multi-layered mystery. The top layer is the hiring of Hollywood gum shoe Toby Peters to protect Fred Astaire from a gangster who wants private dancing lessons for his moll. Then the moll shows up dead.... J.N. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 11, 2005
Picking up from the cultural criticism collected in A New World Order
(2001), Phillips goes one step further, imagining himself into the life of Burt Williams (1874–1922), a vaudeville performer who became, in the turn-of-the-century years before Jack Johnson's championship, the most famous of black Americans. The result is not so much a novel as a loving biographical fiction, one in which Phillips, perhaps channeling Williams's natural (and often challenged) sense of dignity and propriety, shows the more humiliating aspects of his life in a kind of half light. Williams was the first black performer to don blackface and was a master, with partner George Walker, of the cakewalk. Phillips is amazing at rendering the wrenching contradictions of "playing the coon" as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois became prominent, and what those contradictions did to Williams's psyche—as well as to Walker's (who reacted very differently), and to those of their wives, Lottie Williams and Aida (née Ada) Overton Walker. Williams's life—emigration from the Bahamas; hardscrabble youth marked by racism; hard climb to stardom; relatively heavy drinking and dissipation; early, childless death—emerges piecemeal. Beyond a few set pieces, Phillips shies away from a full-on dramatization of Williams and Walker's stage act. (He includes some verbatim dialogues, songs and contemporary reviews instead.) The whole is suffused in Phillips's brilliant, if here filigreed, light.

Bert Williams, a West Indian immigrant, was a dancer, singer, and comic at the turn of the twentieth century. After a shaky and dangerous start in logging camps and backwaters across America, Williams and his partner, George Walker, moved on to play vaudeville, Broadway, and Buckingham Palace. Dion Graham narrates this story of a gifted actor forced by racism to be a clown. Reviled by his own people for creating the caricature of the servile "coon" and receiving accolades from the white community when pandering to the stereotype, Williams was filled with self-loathing, which Graham illuminates with restraint and intelligence. Phillips uses interior monologues and dreams, actual letters, and newspaper and celebrity quotes to frame the story, and Graham's rich, warm baritone offers an achingly real portrait of a man divided within himself. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine