An actor, singer, lawyer, athlete, scholar and activist for racial justice and workers’ rights who used his voice to challenge boundaries and expectations long before the Civil Rights Era, Paul Robeson was a towering figure in 20th-century arts and culture. It’s almost impossible to tell the whole story of all of his accomplishments and feats in one production about his life.
“All you can really do is share highlights so that people will be enticed and intrigued enough so that they might do a little bit more research and find out more about him,” says Jason McKinney, who portrays Robeson in the production of “Moments With Paul.” “Robeson’s career spanned so many decades when America was going through so many turbulent changes and shifts and he used his voice and his notoriety as an actor and a singer and an activist to go about and to share with his audiences the true nature of what was going on in the colonized parts of the globe, especially in Africa and in the Caribbean.”
McKinney, a Milwaukee native, is excited to be coming to Madison for
“Moments With Paul,” a musical and spoken play that will be featured at the Bartell Theatre June 1-6. Produced by United in Music, Inc., the play features McKinney as Robeson, the African-American Renaissance man who rose to prominence in multiple arenas at a time when racism and segregation were rampant in the United States.
“Robeson wanted to make sure that people knew that just because there was one great Black singer to entertain people all throughout the world, he also wanted to shed some light on the fact that there were millions of others that did not have a true and proper voice for equality. And that’s what he tried to do,” McKinney tells Madison365.
McKinney says he was in his late teens when he first heard Robeson’s voice.
“But it was then in my 20s when I learned a little bit about his struggle in his career, and what it meant for Black History in America, and then you go you dig a little bit deeper and then you realize that, as popular as he was, throughout all different creeds and nationalities throughout the world, he was stricken from his own homeland’s history — from American history — because of people who were opposed to him politically,” McKinney says.
As Robeson spoke out against racism and became a world activist, he was blacklisted during the paranoia of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
“His career was railroaded and he had to fight for many, many long years to try and get it back and it never really was as great as it could have been because he had so many powerful enemies, and all because he was strong enough and brave enough to speak out for what was wrong in the face of overwhelming opposition and evil tendencies,” McKinney says.
Christopher Bagley, a native of Baltimore who has been involved with music since age 5 when his father began teaching him to play piano, portrays Robeson’s accompanist, Lawrence Brown, in “Moments With Paul.”
“Even though he used his message, and he used his mission, the thing that I find fascinating about Robeson is how talented and how multi-dimensional he was,” Bagley tells Madison365. “I mean, there were a lot of people that spoke out against injustice and a lot of people that spoke about human rights and civil rights and workers’ rights. But there weren’t a whole lot of people that were so excellent in everything that they did. And that all of that was within this one man, and he was willing to basically sacrifice a lot of that just so that he could address his mission and his message.”
Bagley says he enjoys portraying Brown, who was a very interesting man in his own right.
“He was Paul’s accompaniest for about 40 years but prior to playing for Paul Robeson, he played for the great tenor Roland Hayes,” Bagley says. “And so he had met Paul in the early 20s when Paul first went to Europe, and they got together then, but Lawrence Brown ended up doing a big part acting in Paul Robeson’s plays. He was just an amazing musician. And he was sought after … he was a composer, he was an accompanist, and he also vocally accompanied Paul Robeson during his touring times.”
Bagley and McKinney have been working together since 2012, touring and performing and telling the incredible story of Paul Robeson.
“We wanted to do something that would be able to tell the story of Robeson from the point of view of a singer. And so we wanted to sort of expand a little bit on the singing aspect and still tell the story of Robeson’s biography, but to tell it with songs that are important to that period in his life,” McKinney says. “So we want to just expand the music of it a little bit. And we wanted it to be a little bit more versatile.
“We wanted something that we could do in 45 minutes if we needed to, or we could do it over two hours if we wanted to. And we wanted something that could be used for people’s meetings, it could be done for educational purposes. It could be done in the theater. It can be done outside,” he adds. “We wanted something that can be a little bit more approachable, a little bit more versatile, something that we could make our own. And that’s why we decided to do ‘Moments with Paul.’”
This will be the duo’s second trip to Madison to perform “Moments with Paul.” They first came through in 2014 as part of a midwest tour.
“My parents are both alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They both graduated there and my father played football for them in the ’60s,” Mckinney says. “We spent a lot of time as growing up visiting Madison quite a bit. My sister lives in Madison now with her husband and two kids. I have a great connection to Madison.”
“We are looking forward to coming back. We’re doing 10 shows June 1-June 6. We’re doing five matinees and we’re doing five evening shows,” Bagley adds. “We really, really want to get a younger audience. I didn’t learn about Paul Robeson in school. This is an opportunity to learn about an individual that was just so important in the history of the United States and that was a forerunner for so many of the things that are going on today.”
McKinney says that there wouldn’t have been a civil rights movement without all of the work done by people like Paul Robeson.
“He was protesting and fighting for equal rights 20 years before the Civil Rights Act was even thought of in the U.S. He did his part in a time when it was not really recognized or even remembered. It’s in that sort of gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement is when he did a bulk of his work for equality throughout the world, not just for America, but workers’ rights and human rights throughout the world.”
Performances for “Moments With Paul” will take place at Bartell Theatre on the Drury Stage Wednesday, June 1, Thursday, June 2, Friday, June 3, Sunday, June 5, and Monday, June 6, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 for general admission seating and $20 for student. For tickets, click here.
