Culture & Flash

James Earl Jones is Driving Miss Daisy on Broadway

James Earl Jones sat onstage at the New York Times‘ TimesTalks program and told the audience: “I am a journeyman. I walk and pick up roles where I can find them.”
Well, his latest walk has taken him to Driving Miss Daisy. Jones has joined film legend Vanessa Redgrave for a limited revival of the Pulitzer-, Tony- and Oscar- winning story about the relationship between an Atlanta Black chauffeur and a Jewish widow in the Jim Crow South. Audiences watch the two superstars at the Golden Theater verbally spar and physically age onstage over the decades from the 1940′s through the 1960′s.
Jones has easily slid into the role of Hoke, a part made famous on stage and screen by Morgan Freeman. “Both Morgan and I are from Mississippi. We know people like that,” he remarked. “I know Hoke. Hoke is a throwback. He doesn’t have the power of speech and he doesn’t read. He’s a lot more intelligent than his speech would suggest.”
Ironically, speech has always been a problem for the man with the most famous voice in America. “I’m a walking irony,” said Jones.  “I am still a stutterer and my main focus is to communicate.”
The son of the late actor Robert Earl Jones (The Sting) grew up with his grandmother and was very shy as a child. Jones said he was almost mute until a teacher inspired him. He said, “If you love words, you have to say it out loud.”
As a student at the University of Michigan, Jones entered theater with his first role-as a horse. By 1957, he made his Broadway debut and within three years Jones began a long affiliation with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. During the 1960′s, he performed in the park with George C. Scott and later both appeared in the classic film Dr. Strangelove.  Both were nominated in 1969 for Oscars in signature roles-Scott for Patton and Jones for the Great White Hope.  Scott’s general won.
So far, the Oscar has eluded Jones. Still, his work has earned a treasure trove of other awards: two Tonys, four Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Obies, five Drama Desks and a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center Honor and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement.
Back in the 1970′s, studios even talked with him about starring as the original Shaft. “I’m a country boy,” he laughed. ” I don’t know how to act like a street dude.” Instead, he was offered stalwart types-admirals, generals, judges, kings and even  The Man, the 1972 film about the first Black president of the United States.
Audience favorites include: The Lion King, Claudine, The River Niger, The Greatest, A Piece of the Action, Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars, Coming to America, The Hunt for Red October, Cry the Beloved Country, Field of Dreams, Star Wars and the list goes on.
Broadway is still his base. Jones onstage is an unforgettably powerful performer. August Wilson had said he wrote Troy, the Tony winning character from Fences, with Jones in mind. “Fences was not just a social message, it was a political message,” said Jones.  He saw Denzel Washington’s Tony-winning performance. “He did beautifully with it,” he said. “The audience would like to just eat him up,” Jones laughed.
Jones is turning 80 and is married and has an adult son. He reminisced about creating fatherly bonds with two actors who played his sons on Broadway. The original Fences son (Courtney Vance) “just makes me weep,” he remarked. “The minute I laid eyes on Terrence Howard, I knew he was my son,” he said of his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof co-star.
While performing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in London, masses of Star Wars fans would line up outside the theater waving posters, helmets and other Star Wars memorabilia hoping to be signed by Jones, the voice of Darth Vader.
Jones knows the power of the voice. “If you fall in love with your own voice,” he said, “no one else will listen to it.”

Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” Takes Ntozake Shange’s Prose to the Big Screen
Over 35 years have passed since Ntozake Shange’s courageous choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf burst onto the New York stage. Shange’s poetic, dramatic, stark storytelling about a rainbow of experiences of a group of Black women with romance, family, dance, abortion, music, violence, rape, God and self-love mesmerized audiences. It was taken to stages Off Broadway and on Broadway by theatrical legends producer Joseph Papp, associate producer Woodie King, and director Oz Scott. The production earned Obie Awards and a Tony for actress Trazana Beverley.
In 1982, PBS broadcast a special production of For Colored Girls…directed by Scott and starring Shange, Beverley, Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard, which is available on DVD. For decades, the production has been a staple for young women in regional theaters and college classrooms nationwide. Now it is a major motion picture by Tyler Perry with a cast of top Hollywood actresses.
“It was intimidating work,” Tyler Perry admitted at a packed press conference in New York. “It means so much to many people. Especially women.”
Surrounding Perry was a stellar group: Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Kerry Washington, Macy Gray and newcomer Tessa Thompson.  Whoopi Goldberg was a no-show, she is working her day job on The View.
For Colored Girls was filmed this summer in Harlem and at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. Kerry Washington (Ray, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) was starring on Broadway and found herself shooting her social worker role in Harlem during the day and racing to the stage to be in Race at night. When the crew moved to Atlanta, she was amazed to be filming at Tyler’s Sidney Poitier Soundstage and  Ruby Dee/Ossie Davis Soundstage. “It showed we can own our stories,” she said: Kimberly Elise (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, John Q) had to let go of her peaceful life of meditation and diet to tackle the difficult life of Crystal. “I began with five gray hairs and finished the production with 50,” she stressed. “Crystal wasn’t connected and she walks through the film disconnected.”
For Janet Jackson (Why Did I Get Married), her recent collaboration with Perry was a different dramatic experience. “Acting has always been a challenge for me,” she explained. She found magazine publisher Jo to be “shrewd, bold, she has a lot of bitch inside her.”
To British actress Thandie Newton (The Pursuit of Happyness, Crash), the poetry was an extension of each character. “Emotion took over for words,” she said. “I went to a completely new place. It worked so perfectly to express the inexpressible.”
The parts were so intense for the actresses that Perry, at times, had to safely sooth them out of their characters.
“He would say ‘come on back up,’” said Elise. “He’s been there as an actor.”
“I know how difficult it is to go that deep,” added Perry. “It was important for them to know they were safe.”
Like actor Forrest Whitaker directing author Terry McMillan’s acclaimed Waiting to Exhale, with an all-Black female cast (which included Loretta Devine), actor-director Perry found himself surrounded by top actresses and retelling a work by a renowned Black woman writer.
“As a man, it is difficult to understand a lot of this,” he explained. “I talked with Ntozake a lot.”
The men of For Colored Girls, actors Michael Ealy (The Good Wife, Takers), Omari Hardwick (The A Team, Miracle at St. Anna), Richard Lawson (How Stella Got Her Grove Back), Hill Harper (CSI: NY) and Khalil Kain (Girlfriends), take the audience on an emotional roller coaster with their relationships.
“The men were just as committed,” said Perry. “They wanted to make sure they were supporting the women.”
Like her character Gilda in For Colored Girls, there’s a serenity about Phylicia Rashad (The Cosby Show).  “All women in the world are colored girls,” the  Broadway star told the press corps.  “When we understand women correctly, society changes.”

Sheree Renee Thomas Recommends True Terror Tales
Halloween might be over but the popularity of terrifying tales of horror, fantasy and science fiction will not die. Sheree Renee Thomas, the acclaimed editor of the award-winning short story tome Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, is considered a leading literary expert in the genre. Her books have traced the African-American speculative fiction writers from W.E.B. DuBois to L.A. Banks.
“Black readers love to read. Speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy and horror are genres that when done well, truly challenge readers and spark our imaginations,” she pointed out.  “That’s what I’m looking for when I curl up with a book, something that’s going to challenge my default settings and make me think that wonderful question that inspires all stories, “What if…?”
I touched base with Sheree to recommend her favorite top ten Black sci-fi and supernatural writers. Literary legends Octavia E. Butler (Kindred and Wild Seed) and Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren) led the list. They were followed by Tananarive Due (The Between and My Soul to Keep) and  Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring and Skinfolk).  In addition, she enjoys Andrea Hairston (Mindscape), Nnedi Okorafor (The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death), N. K. Jemison (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) and Steven Barnes (Blood Brothers, Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart). For vampire mavens she lists  Terrence Taylor’s series Bite Marks about New York vamps and Black folks in the 1980′s and Minion by L. A. Banks, described by Sheree as “Sankofa meets Buffy the Vampire and you’ve got a wild ride!”
To Sheree, the current sci-fi boom in books, television, movies and even theater is happening because we are living in an increasingly more sci-fi world. “Who would have thought we’d be reading books from small, portable tablets, or that the Internet would change the way we even use our phones?  Our tech is moving so fast it’s all our spirits and minds can do to try to keep up,” she explained. “Pop culture embraces the changes, so here we are watching television shows and programs that attempt to imagine those changes for us.”
Right now, Shotgun Lullabies, a collection of magical and terrifying short stories and poetry penned by Sheree Renee Thomas, is scheduled for release in January 2011. For aspiring sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, check out her 2011 Writer’s Workshop at Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis Tear Down Fences on Broadway

Time is running out to check out Denzel Washington’s powerful performance in the hit revival of Fences.

His acclaimed role as patriarch Troy, in the first Broadway revival of August Wilson’s classic drama, has earned him amazing critical raves, sold-out performances, and a prestigious Tony Award for Best Actor in a Drama. Fences is running at the Cort Theater until July 11.

After a five-year lapse from the New York theater, the two-time Oscar winner (Glory and Training Day) and New York metro area native has returned triumphantly to the stage. Now, its under the direction of Kenny Leon, who won acclaim bringing Sean Combs to Broadway in the Tony winning revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun. Leon, now Broadway’s leading African-American director, was mentored by both Wilson and Lloyd Richards, Wilson’s longtime director who headed Yale University’s drama school and directed the original production of “Raisin in the Sun.” Leon, the director of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” of plays at the Kennedy Center, had been nominated for Tony Awards for August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” and “Radio Golf.” Through his brilliant production of “Fences,” the play picked up a coveted Tony Award for “Best Play Revival.”
Weeks before the star-studded opening of “Fences,” I found myself sitting at a roundtable interview at Sardi’s Restaurant with Washington and the cast. It gave me flashbacks to attending a special 1987 press dinner with August Wilson, James Earl Jones, director Lloyd Richards and the original cast of “Fences” at the Alconquin Hotel, another legendary theater gathering space.

I had covered Washington during his New York Off-Broadway theater days at the Negro Ensemble Company and Woodie King’s New Federal Theater. Back in the late 70′s and early 80′s, Washington was considered a major New York theater actor. He was a leading actor in high profile Off -Broadway productions like his Obie Award -winning performance in the Negro Ensemble Company production of Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play, which earned a Pulitzer Prize (he revived his role on film in “A Soldier’s Story”). Portraying Malcolm X in Laurence Holder’s “When The Chickens Come Home to Roost,” produced by Woodie King, mesmerized audiences, including a young Spike Lee, who later cast Washington in his Oscar-nominated role of Malcolm X.

Yet his Broadway turns in the Ron Milner-Woodie King production of “Checkmates” and later in the drama “Julius Caesar” received little accolades.

The idea to come back to the New York stage began when Hollywood producer Scott Rudin brought Washington a screenplay of “Fences” and tried to persuade him to make the film. Instead, it compelled Washington to read August Wilson’s play.

“I went and read the play and cried. Then laughed. It’s a great, great, great, great play,” recalled Washington, casually dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and still strikingly handsome in his fifties.

“Very rarely to you get to work and interpret the work of a master. A grand master. And August Wilson is one. He is Eugene O’Neill. He is Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. It’s a masterpiece,” Washington stated. “I’ve been around. I’ve read a lot of plays and screenplays. “Knowing he’s gone and I fortunately got a chance to meet him. You can feel him. His plays are spiritual.”

The international movie star likes his new role being back on the New York stage. “What I love about theater and what I love about it now, given the position that I’m in, is that it gives me a chance to be one of the guys,” he stressed. “I’m another member of the cast. I have a role to play. This is what I love.”

“This is how I started as an actor in the theater right up the block at Lincoln Center,” he explained. “When I left New York in 1982, I was doing a Pulitzer Prize winning play. I had just done When The Chickens Come Home to Roost and followed that up with A Soldier’s Play, which won a Pulitzer Prize. I left to go to LA to do what I thought was a 13-week job called St. Elsewhere. Four kids and 25 years whatever years later, I started working my way back. I never really felt that LA was my home. New York is my home. Now we have a home here.”

Although at 55, he is a similar age to James Earl Jones, when Jones created Troy on Broadway, Washington brings a different type of theatrical magnetism to the role.
“They are specific about this African American family, but the themes are universal. The husband and wife relationship, the bitterness of the husband about not being successful in life, dreams deferred, and the father and son relationship,” said Washington. “All of those themes-black, white, blue, green and yellow-we all relate to them.”
Viola Davis, who portrays wife Rose, was undeterred about possible comparisons with actress Mary Alice, who was in the original production. Davis is a Broadway star and August Wilson favorite. She won a Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Wilson’s King Hedley II and grabbed Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for his drama Seven Guitars.

“It’s always easier when people have no expectations, because then you are always going to be surprised,” said Davis, who believes the audience has to be open. “You have to come with a blank slate and then you have to allow whatever the actors are doing to infuse you, to move you.”
The Julliard trained actress has been appearing in TV and films since 1996. She’s been featured in director’s Steven Soderberg’s Traffic and Syriana and Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin.’ Also, she’s been popular with Black directors like Denzel Washington’s Antoine Fisher, George Wolfe’s Nights in Rodanthe and Debbie Allen’s Lifetime film The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life is Not a Fairy Tale.
Yet, it was her heartbreaking performance in the film Doubt as the mother of the lone African American child in a strict Catholic school in the sixties that earned her national acclaim. The scene stealing performance with Meryl Streep scooped up Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG and Critics Choice Awards nominations. Audiences can currently see her on HBO’s United States of Tara and the Tom Cruise movie Knight and Day. This summer, she plays Julia Roberts’ best friend in the highly awaited Eat Pray Love.
Returning to the work of August Wilson and creating such a poignant performance as Rose in Fences has won the actress raves and another Tony Award. “We all have a little Wilsonisque in us,” explained Davis. “Because it’s our experience. It an African-American experience. Our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers our grandparents.”

Through The Night Will Touch You!!

If you ever wondered what Black men struggle with in our communities, wonder no more. Go and see Through The Night at the Riverside Theatre. This newest play written and performed by the talented, versatile Daniel Beaty, is a story that lets you know some of the plights that Black men live through on a daily basis.
Beaty portrays six Black men and four Black women and does each character with such a heartfelt realism you will surely be touched by the problems and distress which plague their hearts. Beaty decided to write this play after reading a National Urban League report about the “State of Black Males in the U.S.” The report painted a bleak picture of a future filled with failure and incarceration. Beaty’s characters have issues, but also find ways to survive through their issues. The beauty of Beaty’s writing is that all his characters are intricately connected. There’s Mr. Rogers, an owner of a health food store in the ghetto; his intelligent and sensitive 10-year-old son Eric; his wife Sarah who believes in his dram of this business; his ex-con employee Dre; Dre’s pregnant girlfriend Kim; Twon, a neighbor who is graduating from high school and is going to Morehouse; his mother; the neighborhood church  pastor Bishop, his wife Ellen, their son Isaac and his boyfriend-Allen.
The story that Beaty weaves so well will have you mesmerized. From the opening scene, this incredible playwright creates characters that are so layered. As he changes persona, everything transforms into the specific character-body language, tone, voice, use of language and facial expressions. Now, some may say this is a given for any actor, but when you experience Beaty’s delivery you will realize he takes creating and performing characters to an elevated level.
I’ve tried to whet your appetite, but haven’t shared the meat of the production because the flavor of his poetry, singing and acting is a theatrical fare you need to savor first hand. Just know you will laugh a lot, you will cry some, but you will be completely engrossed from the beginning to the end.
The show is playing four more performances on June 6, 7 and 8. This is a show that not only shares the struggles of Black men, but their triumphs and the extremely critical role that a strong, loving, supportive Black mother or wife can play in the life of a Black man.
To buy tickets call 212-870-6784. This show is appropriate for teens and older. This play is powerfully directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. The show is being presented as part of the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Riverside Theatre and the 46th Anniversary of the New Heritage Theatre Group.

Black Shows And Performers Grab Tony Nominations
The Tony Award nominations are out and African-American productions and performers are faring very well. FELA, the musical produced by Jay-Z, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Alicia Keys is up for Best Musical; Best Book of a Musical-Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones; Best Direction of a Musical-Bill T. Jones; Best Choreography of a Musical-Bill T. Jones; Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical-Sahr Ngaujah; Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical-Lillias White; Best Scenic Design of a Musical-Marina Draghici; Best Costume Design of a Musical-Marina Dragnici; Best Lighting Design of a Musical-Robert Wierzel; Best Sound Design of a Musical-Robert Kaplowitz; and Best Orchestration of a Musical-Aaron Johnson.
Fences got 10 nominations which included: Best Revival of a Play; Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play-Denzel Washington; Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play-Viola Davis; Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play-Stephen McKinley Henderson; Best Direction of a Play-Kenny Leon; Best Costume Design of a Play-Constanza Romero; Best Scenic Design of a Play-Santo Loquasto; Best Lighting Design of a Play-Brian MacDevitt; Best Sound Design of a Play-Acme Sound Partners; and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre-Branford Marsalis.
Memphis-received eight Tony nominations: Best Musical; Best Book of a Musical; Best Original Score Written for the Theatre; Best Direction of a Musical; Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical-Chad Kimball; Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical-Montego Glover; and Best Orchestra.
In the plays Race and Superior Donuts African-American actors David Alan Grier and Jon Michael Hill respectively both received Tony nominations in the Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.
The Tony Awards will air live on CBS, Sunday, June 13 from 8pm-11pm. Watch and root for your favorites.

On The Aisle – 2009: A Year in Review in Black Theater

2009 was an absolutely phenomenal year for Blacks in theater from off-Broadway to Broadway. If you came by the way of Brooklyn, you got to enjoy the magnificent writing of Jackie Alexander, as the Billie Holiday Theatre presented, The High Priestess of Dark Alley with an all-Black cast. A superb production of The Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson played at the Public Theatre. It featured a mixed cast which was very talented. It was like watching an expose’ on how the FBI and the Ku Klux Klan worked against Blacks during the Civil Rights Movement down South.
A show that features another mixed cast is on Broadway and is going strong at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, that show is HAIR and it is definitely worth experiencing. When you walk in the theatre and take a seat you are made a part of the Tribe of hippies who believe in free love, flowing drugs and long hair. This show is a blast! Although the show has since closed, the revival of Guys and Dolls on Broadway that starred Titus Burgess in the role of Nicely Nicely Johnson was a pleasure to watch. Burgess rocked the house when he did the character’s signature number “You’re Rocking The Boat.”
When you go to the theater it is truly a gift when you get to see a dramatic production that teaches you about an injustice that Black people have suffered. It shares their trials, but also the fact that they managed to survive. That is the kind of inspiration and heartfelt message that came across to audiences as they were stunned and captivated, while watching Ruined, a drama by Lynn Nottage that played at the New York City Center.  The play shared the true stories of women who had been victimized by soldiers in war torn Democratic Republic of Congo. As you walked around the theatre pictures of actual women Nottage interviewed were displayed on the walls. The play also got Nottage her due, as she received the Pulitzer Prize for it in 2009.
On the lighter side of entertainment, audiences were almost falling out of their chairs onto the floor of the Beacon Theatre when Tyler Perry’s The Marriage Counselor was performed. Perry just has a way with words that make them so down to earth, but hilarious at the same time. The characters he creates remind one of someone you might actually know. His stories are hilarious, but also always have a bit of a religious aspect to them. The marriage counselor’s story reminds one of the expression “physician heal thyself.” It was incredible to watch the revival of August Wilson’s drama Joe Turner’s Come And Gone at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. It was presented by Lincoln Center and spotlighted the talents of a tremendous, mainly Black cast. In fact, Roger Robinson won the Tony this year for his role.
Tony Award-winner Phylicia Rashad returned to Broadway as Violet Weston in Tracy Lett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play August Osage County. The comedy/drama played at the Music Box Theatre, and looked at the dysfunctional life of a pill-popping, sharp-tongued mother of three.
Some wonderful shows that had a limited life were Pure Confidence and a revival of The Wiz. Both these shows were wonderful. The first looked at the life story of a slave, who was also a jockey and won races easily. The other production gave Ashanti Singer her chance to debut on stage and it was a magnificent show.
A milestone was reached withDavid Lamb’s Platanos & Collard Greens as it celebrated its sixth year at the Florence Guild Hall on 59th St. The funny production looks at relationships between Blacks and Latinos and discloses stereotypes they have about each other.
Roger Guenvere Smith performed his one-man Frederick Douglass Now at the Irish Arts Center. The Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center premiered Broke-ology, a play by African-American playwright Nathan Louis Jackson. The drama featured an all-Black cast and showed how two brothers struggled over the decision of how to take care of an ill father. FELA! made its explosive Broadway debut and celebrates the life, music and political struggles of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the father of the Afrobeat. This musical is at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre at W. 49th St.
Some other wonderful shows that happened in 2009 was Sing Harlem Sing at the Dempsey Theatre on W. 127th St. There was River Crosses Rivers-Short Plays by Women of Color at the Castillo Theatre and was presented by New Federal Theatre. It featured plays by Lynn Nottage, Ruby Dee, P.J. Gibson, Naveen Bahar Choudhury, Cori Thomas and Bridgette Wimberly. A new original Broadway musical is Memphis at the Shubert Theatre on W 44th St.  Dreamgirls came to the Apollo Theatre before going on tour. Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy made its New York premiere and it was moving to watch. A comedy/drama, Superior Donuts by Tracy Letts played at the Music Box Theatre and served as the Broadway debut vehicle for young African-American actor Jon Michael Hill. Finian’s Rainbow opened on Broadway and is still playing featuring Chuck Cooper. Ragtime has been revived and is being brilliantly presented at the Neil Simon Theatre.
In 2010, let me just mention some of the names that will be on Broadway, Denzel Washington, Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis, Ron Cephas Jones and Antony Mackie.