It required more than physical stamina, given the additional task of confounding the racial barriers Davis faced from the moment he entered the profession as a four-year-old tap dancer in segregated Depression America. This wasn’t vanity on Davis’s part it was indicative of the kind of determination that drove him throughout his career-to accomplish what no one else had ever accomplished in the entertainment field. But only one of them had the guts to commit to the grueling schedule of a run on Broadway. have in common? Well, obviously, they were among the stellar lights of contemporary popular music in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. What do Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis Jr. The lead character of Joe Wellington (whimsically renamed from Odets’s original Italian hero, Joe Bonaparte) required a stage personality of considerable talent, courage, and endurance. Crafted specifically for Davis’s talents by the hot Broadway songwriting team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams ( Bye Bye Birdie) and tailored by Odets to capture the racially charged boxing era of Sugar Ray Robinson and Cassius Clay, Golden Boy was a rare topical show on Broadway during the 1960s, a decade more hospitable to genteel entertainment.
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This was the life of Sammy Davis Jr., beginning in the spring of 1964 when he took on the lead in a musical update of Clifford Odets’s Depression-era drama Golden Boy. But wait, as the saying goes, there’s more: You’re collaborating with a pair of biographers on your memoirs every night into the wee small hours. How about we give you a meticulously choreographed fight for the finale? Oh, and while you’re doing eight shows a week (including two on Wednesdays and Saturdays), you’re recording albums, doing charity benefits, and, to top it off, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Then imagine you have to perform ten songs, four of them solos.
Imagine what it must be like to star in a Broadway musical. emanated enough star power to put the Hubble telescope out of business. With his diminutive frame, Sammy Davis Jr.