Shuffle Along, or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, directed and written by George C. Wolfe, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2016. The $12 million show closed at a loss after just 100 performances – 404 fewer than the Shuffle Along of 1921, which was one of the few shows of the decade to run more than 500 performances. What led to the abbreviated, disappointing run of Shuffle Along, or, The Making of…? Its veteran, controversial producer, Scott Rudin, blamed it on the upcoming maternity leave of six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, who played the star role of Lottie Gee. Rudin brought a suit against insurer Lloyd's of London for refusing to pay on two policies worth $14.1 million, a Non-Appearance policy and an Abandonment policy entitling producers to compensation if a performance had to be cancelled due to the ‘Death, Accident, or Illness’ of McDonald. Lloyd's of London claimed that pregnancy is not a death, accident or illness and that the show did not need to close when it was playing at 101.25 per cent capacity during its final week. Shuffle Along, or, The Making of… boasted many stars, including Tony Award winners Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, although it did not win any of the ten Tony Awards for which it was nominated. The litigious Rudin had failed in his bid to reclassify the show as a revival so it would not have to battle Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash hit Hamilton, winner of eleven of its record-breaking sixteen Tony nominations. After four years of court battles, Rudin and Lloyd's of London finally agreed to drop the insurance case in October 2020.

There is much to unpack in this story of lawsuits, a dash of pregnancy-shaming, and duelling musicals deeply rooted in American history and commitments to performers of colour. This chapter will focus on how the ‘failure’ of Shuffle Along, or, The Making of… reveals the challenges of restaging and remembering modernist Black performance on contemporary stages.

Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have focused on Pound’s poetic depictions of women and his relationships with women artists, patrons and muses. The fascinating biographical stories include such figures as the poet H. D., perhaps Pound’s first love; the pianist and patron Margaret Cravens, who took her life after playing a song Pound and Walter Rummel wrote for her; Pound’s wife, Dorothy (Shakespear) Pound; and his long-time mistress, Olga Rudge, a concert violinist. When critics focus on sexuality and Pound, the result tends to be ‘paranoid’ rather than ‘reparative’ readings, to use Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation.