KID CREOLE’S CIRCUITOUS SAFARI

The history of lynching should be taught before Columbus in American schools; how, after Emancipation, something like 200 black men per year were tortured to death on suspicion of having slept with white women, it took one black female journalist several years of lecturing and writing about this outrage and the psychological aberrations which engendered it to stop the madness: moral pressure from Europe, where Ida B. Wells pled the case against Southern lynch mobs, forced domestic authorities to stem the bloody tide.

Recognition of these title bits of hidden and conveniently forgotten history inform the music and stage show of Kid Creole And The Coconuts, a world of erudite imagination where Hollywood glamour collides with sordid reality. When bandleader/composer August Darnell shares his stage with three pretty blonde chorines he tags as ''innocent, but not so innocent," it would help his audience enormously to remember Ida B. Wells and the strangely tantilizing aura of sex and death that hangs over this allegorical King Kong and his three Fay Wrays, with a menace that goes beyond the Freudian.