Saturday night at Harlem's Apollo Theater in the mid-1950s is wonderfully captured in these variety revues, Basin Street Revue and Rock'n'Roll Revue. Despite their rather arbitrary titles, each variety show combines jazz, swing, rhythm-and-blues and rock'n'roll as well as performances by dancers and acts by humorists. Among the many famous musicians included in the films are Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Count Basie, Nat “King” Cole, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Martha Davis and Spouse, Ruth Brown, The Larks and Amos Milburn. The dancers include Little Buck and The Businessmen of Rhythm, and the variety shows are spiced with the humor of Nipsy Russell and Freddy and Flo.
Both films were is shot in black and white, however Rock'n'Roll Revue is, rather strangely, printed on toned color stock which is now pink; the actual acts were re-created in a studio across the street from the Apollo, and are intercut with footage of the Apollo audience. There is nothing fancy about the cinematography or the editing in these films; they simply immortalize a period of musical and cultural history, and a place, the Apollo Theater, which, though it has recently re-opened, will obviously never be the same.