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Arts & Entertainment

Pins and Needles: From Barbra Streisand to Brooklyn Revolutionaries

A hit Broadway show from the 1930s makes clear: The issues haven't much changed.

A few blocks away and 40 years after she became a tenant organizer at Walt Whitman Houses , Cynthia Butts – “Ms. Fort Greene,” as she likes to be called – has suddenly become a star of a musical comedy.

She is one of the 18 cast members on the stage of the Irondale Center in the Foundry Theatre’s spirited revival – more an inspired adaptation – of “Pins and Needles,” a musical revue from the 1930’s that has its own astonishing backstage story.

None of the cast of the original show were professional performers; they were seamstresses and cutters, dressmakers and cloakmakers, all of them members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The show had a point of view, pushing issues the union cared about, but it did so with such a mix of timely skits and amusing, melodious songs, that it became a huge hit, transferring to Broadway and running a total of more than two and a half years.

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The cast of the Foundry Theatre’s production of “Pins and Needles,” which is cheekily subtitled “A New Revolutionary Musical in Brooklyn,” are health-care workers and child-care providers, legal secretaries and laid-off telephone operators, and they are all also community organizers for Furee (Families for Racial and Economic Equality), which began a decade ago as a welfare rights advocacy group.  Furee has since expanded to include involvement in tenant organizing, advocating for affordable housing and against destructive development, voter registration,  youth empowerment and other issues.

What most startled cast member Marilyn Charles when she began rehearsals for the show six months ago, was how relevant a 75-year-old show remained.  “We’re still struggling for rent laws, for affordable housing, for union representation, for better working conditions,” she says. “Then and now – it’s almost the same.”

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Charles is one of the few members of the cast with professional experience as a performer.  For many years, she performed as the calypso singer Lady Venus with the group Mighty Sparrow, singing internationally and at prestigious local venues like BAM and Carnegie Hall. She stopped when she became a mother in 1991. She now provides child care. Protecting child care workers is one of Furee’s signature issues.

Ten of the 14 songs in the Irondale Center production come directly from the initial “Pins and Needles,” which changed continually over the years it spent on Broadway, much the way Newsical or Forbidden Broadway now adds songs or skits to stay timely.  The opening number establishes the tone: “Sing Me A Song of Social Significance.”

“I’m tired of moon songs, of star and of June songs

… Sing me of rights and sing me of justice

… Sing me of lost wages and wars”

 “Chain Store Daisy” is an arrestingly relevant song about being forced to settle for a low-wage job:

“Once I wrote poems put folks in tears

Now I write checks for ladies’ brassieres”

In one of the show-stopping numbers, “When I Grow Up,” three of the youngest members of the cast (including Marilyn Charles’s son, Cory Jeminez) offer up a cutting dig at the police. They want to be a policeman when they grow up, they sing, because:

 “I’d do as I please

Act high-handed and regal

‘cause when you’re a policeman

there’s nothing illegal”

Such political songs from the original show – other titles: “Doing The Reactionary,” “Sitting on Your Status Quo” “Not Cricket to Picket” – exist side by side with love songs, and a wish-I-were-in-love song, the hilarious duet “Nobody Makes a Pass at Me.”

Twenty-five years after the debut of the original production of “Pins and Needles,” so many of these songs were still popular enough that Columbia Records produced an anniversary album featuring a newcomer, Barbra Streisand.

The Foundry Theatre has supplemented the original songs with others from the same period, including one popularized by Josh White, “Free and Equal Blues.”

The songs alternate with skits and full-fledged scenes, most from the original show or other shows of the 1930’s, but most notably a scene taken from a 2004 play, “Fabulation,” by Lynn Nottage (Pulitzer-prize winning playwright of “Ruined”), which effectively depicts the humiliation of waiting on line and filling out forms at a public assistance office.

Geared originally for immigrants from Eastern Europe, the new production effortlessly adjusts to a new audience primarily of African-Americans and Caribbean immigrants: They have kept a Yiddish song from the show, Mene Mene Tekel (“The writing’s on the wall”)  but now deliver it with a Caribbean beat.

 

The Foundry Theatre’s musical revue Furee on Pins & Needles runs through July 9 at the Irondale Center, 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn. Tickets are $25 ($5 to Furee members)

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