“Black No More,” a new Off Broadway musical created by some showbiz heavyweights, uses the title of its source material, the classic 1931 novel by George S. Schuyler about Black people passing as white. But it might be more aptly titled “White Like Me” since it seems to borrow more heavily from John Howard Griffin’s now-forgotten 1961 bestseller, “Black Like Me,” which detailed the white journalist’s account of traveling through the South for six weeks in blackface. The extremely popular book was made into an even more terrible movie in 1964, starring James Whitmore in blackface.
The New Group’s production of “Black No More,” which opened Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, repeats a lot of the racial platitudes and bromides in “Black Like Me.”