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On this ramshackle outline, Choir Leader Hall Johnson has created the finest all-Negro spectacle Manhattan critics can remember, a worthy successor to white Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures in which the Hall Johnson Choir played such a conspicuous part. What Johnson has written is not so much a play as the music & libretto for an opera. His object was to present in dramatic form the background and development of Negro spirituals, to give his chorus of 20 voices a chance to sing his songs.
The slow start of Run, Little Chillun! is quickly forgotten in the orgy of the moon worshippers and the Baptist revival, two scenes as stirring as anything the present season has produced.