APOLLO SHOWTIME! Harlem’s Apollo celebrates its 80th birthday
The Harlem theater’s historian walks down memory lane
What Carnegie Hall is to a classical pianist, the Metropolitan Opera is to a mezzo-soprano pr and Yankee Stadium is to a third baseman, the Apollo Theater The was to a jazz musician, tap dancer, d rhythm and blues group or an urban comedian.
“It was w the pinnacle,” says Smokey Robinson, who sang there countless times with the Miracles and solo. “It was the most important theater in t the world. Once you could say you’d played play the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere. a You had made it.” That stature was w by no means assured, or even foreseen, w when the Apollo opened its doors on Jan. 26 26, 1934. Then it was just one among dozens o of vaudeville and burlesque theaters offering a quick, cheap relief from the Depression.
As it prepares to mark its 80th anniversary this month, it it’s still one of the half dozen most famous theaters the in the world. While it’s true that hyperbole hyp and exaggeration flflow flow easily in no nostalgic talk of bygone cultural institution institutions, the Apollo needs neither.
The biggest s stars did play there. For a buck or two you y could arrive before lunch and stay unt until after midnight, watching fifive five or six s shows by the likes of Charlie Parker, Ell Ella Fitzgerald, the Nicholas Brothers, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bill Robinso Robinson. Or, a few years later, the Tempt Temptations, the Supremes and Jame James Brown. Nor, N with the exception of a few marquee gigs years later, d did these artists play the Apollo as superstars, with catering in their dressing rooms. They played as working artists: singers, musicians, comedians and dancers who stayed on the circuit 40-50 weeks a year, playing to a few hundred or a few thousand people at a time. The Apollo was a week of paying work. It thrived in part because many of these world-class artists couldn’t get enough work from white clubs, theaters or radio networks.
Still, the Apollo was never a consolation prize. It was a theater full of fans who appreciated d some of America’s most original and enduring uring talent. It was a mecca of mostly black culture on America’s most famous mous black street.
When n Sammy Davis Jr. had the he devastating car accident that hat cost him m his left eye in 1954, he booked his first comeback ck show at the Apollo, where he had tap-danced ced for years as a child d prodigy with the Will Mastin Trio.
“This,” he told the audience, “is where I come home.”
The theater heater was not always treated reated with such respect. In 1998, the Daily News exposed xposed that the Apollo’s s Board of Directors under Rep. ep. Charlie Rangel had badly ly mismanaged the landmark by failing to collect rental money due from Percy Sutton, producer of TV’s “Showtime at the Apollo.”
The theater was broke, in disrepair and the stage was empty most of the time. New York State, which has owned the theater since the early ’90s, stepped in, forcing Sutton to pay, removed the Rangel board and brought in a new one chaired by Richard Parsons, under which the Apollo has flourished — as it did before.
In 1967, the late Luther Vandross, who grew up in New York, famously played the Apollo Amateur Night multiple times. “From t the time I was a kid,” he sai said, “that was my dream.” He never wo won. Winning would have put him in a club with Sarah Vaug Vaughan, Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, Ella Fitzgerald and dozens of others. All the winners didn’t become stars, but they all had a universal credential.
“For years,” said Bobby S Schiffman, who ran the Apollo with his father Frank in the 1950s, then ra ran it himself from 1960 until 1976, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere a and it would be delivered. How many t theaters can you say that about?”
Schiffman also readi readily allows that the Apollo was a mix o of romance and reality.
“When you stepped on that stage,” said Otis Will Williams of the Temptations, “you knew kn who’d
HISTORIC THEATER HAS HIT MANY HIGH NOTES
been there before.”
At the same time, artists worked hard for the money, and not much money. Well into the 1950s an Apollo booking meant seven days, five or six shows a day.
“The acts would do their 15-20 minutes, then wait for the next show,” said Gordon Anderson, the Apollo’s unofficial photographer. “They’d hang out in the dressing room and play cards, maybe go out into the alley. Some of them cooked their food.”
Anderson would photograph the first show every week, then print his shots and try to sell them to the artists.
When the Jackson Five played the Apollo, Anderson said, Joe Jackson told him they’d love pictures, but couldn’t afford them.
“I was so mad,” says Anderson, “that I went home and threw away all the negatives. Looking back, I’m not sure that was a smart thing to do.
“But I don’t think anyone was thinking about history. We were just going to work.”
Billy Mitchell was waiting for his aunt outside the Apollo Theater’s backstage door in 1965 when four words changed his life. “Wanna make some money?” owner Frank Schiffman asked the 15-year-old.
Soon the South Bronx teen was fetching coffee, sandwiches and shoeshiners for music legends like the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and James Brown during the Apollo’s prime. “It was destiny,” says Mitchell.
Now 63, he’s worked on and off for the Harlem landmark for nearly five decades.
Mitchell began as an errand boy earning $35 a day, and worked his way up to an usher, stagehand, gift shop manager and the Amateur Night talent coordinator. Today he leads tours of the Apollo as the theater’s historian.
“Imagine seeing Stevie Wonder when he was 15,” says Mitchell. “I remember when the Jacksons first did the Amateur Night show [in 1967]. Michael was about 9, and those kids were always playing tag, running up and down the steps leading to the dressing rooms.”
Mitchell struck up a lifelong friendship with Brown, the Godfather of Soul. “When I didn’t have tuition money, he helped me out,” says Mitchell.
When Brown’s body was brought to the Apollo after his 2006 death, Mitchell recalls the lines of people — including Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel and Slash — who came to pay respects. “Everyone was sad, but there were people who kept it light... pulling out their boom boxes and playing his music, celebrating his life.”
Mitchell remembers having to shadow w the nu metal band Korn for a day.
“Whooo! I’ll never do that again,” he laughs. “They wanted me to get down, and I was too old to hang with those cats. s.s They’re crazy!”
Justin Bieber was better behaved, according to Mitchell. “We sometimes frown upon his actions, but he performs like a seasoned professional,” he says, re- calling when a technical glitch blew the power out during the singer’s 2012 perforrmance. “He calmly grabbed his guitar and nd played his last two songs a cappella.”
If Mitchell ever retires, he plans to move from Canarsie, Brooklyn, to Harlem, where he’ll visit the theater every day. “This theater is something I hold dearly to my heart,” he says. “That’s why they call me Mr. Apollo.”
npesce@nydailynews.com