Tag Archives: Kenny Leon

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK

Kenny Leon moves Much Ado About Nothing to modern-day Atlanta in Shakespeare in the Park adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through June 22, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Danielle Brooks gives a powerhouse comedic performance as Beatrice in Kenny Leon’s jaunty, rollicking adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ever-charming romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing, which opened Tuesday night at the Public’s open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where it continues through June 22. Leon has moved the proceedings to modern-day Atlanta, complete with cell phones, contemporary music, and an impressive car that pulls up at the back of Beowulf Boritt’s welcoming set — the large, grassy courtyard and four-story estate belonging to Gov. Leonato (Chuck Cooper), boasting a pair of red, white, and blue political banners declaring, “Abrams 2020,” referring to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (who recently was in the audience). The show opens with Beatrice singing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” soon joined by Leonato’s daughter, Hero (Margaret Odette), and her ladies-in-waiting, Ursula (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) and Margaret (Olivia Washington), singing “America the Beautiful,” a stark contrast highlighting the polarized state of our nation as the songs overlap. Following a brief protest march with signs condemning hate, the dapper Don Pedro (Billy Eugene Jones) arrives with his contingent after a military victory, including his close friend Count Claudio (Jeremie Harris), his guitar-strumming attendant, Balthasar (Daniel Croix Henderson), and the don’s brother, the bastard Don John (Hubert Point-Du Jour).

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) gossips with her besties in Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

Claudio immediately falls for Hero while Beatrice, Leonato’s niece, and Benedick (Grantham Coleman), a lord who fought alongside Don Pedro, throw sharp barbs at each other, neither in the market for a spouse. (The first time Beatrice says his name, she emphasizes the last syllable.) But Don John, who is no Don Juan, has decided that since he is miserable, no one else is to be happy, so he calls upon his henchmen, Borachio (Jaime Lincoln Smith) and Conrade (Khiry Walker), to stir up trouble and cast would-be lovers against one another. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace,” Don Pedro says. “Though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.” Mistaken identity, misunderstandings, a masquerade ball, spying, lying, and private letters all come into play in one of the Bard’s most beloved comedies.

Tony nominee Brooks (The Color Purple, Orange Is the New Black) is phenomenal as Beatrice, taking full advantage of her size, her vocal talents, and her expert timing. She moves and grooves across the stage, reciting her lines with an easygoing, conversational flow and rhythm, an innate sense of humor, and a magical command of the language that breathes new life into the Bard’s words. “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing,” she proclaims early on. It’s all Coleman (Buzzer) can do to not get swept up in the hurricane that is Brooks; on the rainy night I went, he even took a hard spill on the wet ground, wiping out on his back but getting up quickly, able to joke about the nasty fall. (It reminded me of a special moment I saw in the previous Shakespeare in the Park production of the play five years ago, when John Glover, as Leonato, pulled off an unforgettable, far less dangerous maneuver after a storm.)

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman) explore a love-hate relationship in Bard romantic comedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner and longtime Atlanta resident Leon (American Son, A Raisin in the Sun) has the women take charge in this version, the men relegated to the back seat in the all-person-of-color cast. He even has a woman, Lateefah Holder, portray Constable Dogberry, although her shtick becomes too repetitive (but is very funny at first). Among the males, the always dependable Cooper (Choir Boy, The Piano Lesson) stands out, steady and forthright, while Odette (The Convent, Sign Me) is a sweetly innocent Hero. The fresh choreography is by Camille A. Brown, with snappy costumes by Emilio Sosa and original music by Jason Michael Webb. But at the center of it all is Brooks, who is in full command as a Beatrice for the ages.

(In addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte and the Public to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here. The play is almost never canceled because of bad weather, so going on a rainy day is a great idea, as a lot of seats become available due to no-shows.)

AMERICAN SON

Kendra (Kerry Washington) and Scott (Steven Pasquale) reflect as they await important news in American Son (photo by Peter Cunningham)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 27, $59 – $169
americansonplay.com

Christopher Demos-Brown’s American Son is a blistering, explosive play, a searing deep dive into systemic and institutionalized racism in contemporary America. The story takes place in real time in a Miami police station as a storm rages, torrents of water pouring down outside tall glass windows, mixing with ever-threatening thunder and lightning reminiscent of a horror movie. (The set is by Tony-winning design master Derek McLane, with sound by Peter Fitzgerald and lighting by Peter Kaczorowski.) It’s 4:12 in the morning, and Kendra Ellis-Connor is desperate to locate her eighteen-year-old son, Jamal, a solid kid who has not come home and is not answering his phone. She is frustrated with police officer Paul Larkin, who insists that Kendra wait until the public affairs liaison officer arrives for his shift at 8:00 to find out anything. Kendra’s estranged husband, Scott Connor, shows up and tries to force further information out of Larkin regarding Jamal’s whereabouts, but he is only mildly successful. Ultimately, the liaison officer, Lt. John Stokes, comes in early, but things don’t get any easier for Kendra and Scott, who are getting angrier by the minute, but not just at the cops.

FBI agent Scott Connor (Steven Pasquale) has some choice thoughts for Officer Paul Larkin (Jeremy Jordan) as Kendra (Kerry Washington) looks on in scintillating play at the Booth (photo by Peter Cunningham)

Color-blind casting might (deservedly) be all the rage on Broadway, but the color of each character’s skin is critical to the narrative in American Son as Demos-Brown and director Kenny Leon investigate ripped-from-the-headlines issues of identity, societal perceptions, stereotyping, racial profiling, ingrained prejudice, and cultural biases. Kendra (Kerry Washington) is a black psychology professor who says, “I don’t know I’ve had a sleep-filled night since that boy was born,” constantly fearful that something bad will happen to Jamal because of his race. Scott (Steven Pasquale) is a white FBI agent who wants his son to follow him into law enforcement, putting him on a path to attend West Point, but, not being black, Scott doesn’t share the same worries as Kendra, hoping, “This is just some frivolous nonsense. He probably just had his music cranked up too loud.” Officer Larkin (Jeremy Jordan) is white and has not been properly trained to handle this kind of incendiary situation, assuming that a black teenager out for the night must be part of a posse looking for trouble. “I completely understand your concern,” Larkin tells Kendra, who responds, “Respectfully, Officer — I don’t think you do.” Larkin adds, “Ma’am — I have kids too, OK?” “Any of ’em black?” Kendra says. And Stokes (Eugene Lee) is black, a seasoned officer who is not so quick to see things from Kendra’s or Scott’s points of view; “Settle down now. Settle down,” Stokes declares, but instead of calming the situation, he, well, continues to stoke the fire.

Kendra (Kerry Washington) and Scott (Steven Pasquale) listen intently to Lt. Stokes (Eugene Lee) in American Son (photo by Peter Cunningham)

A white civil trial attorney from South Florida whose previous plays (Fear Up Harsh, Wrongful Death and Other Circus Acts) have dealt with sociopolitical subjects involving different kinds of justice, Demos-Brown was inspired to write American Son — his Broadway debut — by real-life events and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award winner, Between the World and Me, a letter the author pens for his adolescent son about what it’s like to grow up black in the United States. In fact, the script includes an epigraph from the book: “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” Black Tony-winning director Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, Stick Fly), a protégé of August Wilson’s, maintains a sizzling-hot pace, but he and Demos-Brown don’t take sides; all four characters are both guilty and innocent, and yet none of them are as well. The problem is bigger than just four people, each of whom gets to share their perspective. The audience, more racially diverse than at most Broadway shows, is also implicated, each person bringing his or her own personal history and biases with them; be prepared to hear laughs or gasps at certain times when you’re not reacting the same way as those sitting around you, the differences very much representative of the race of the audience member.

All four actors give dynamic, honest performances, led by Washington (Race, Scandal), a mother of two small children, a boy and a girl; at a postshow discussion the night I went, Washington talked about the fears black mothers have for their sons, something that brought even more intensity to her performance. (The play, which continues at the Booth through January 27 and boasts such producers as Nnamdi Asomugha, Jada Pinkett Smith, Shonda Rimes, Dwyane Wade, and Gabrielle Union-Wade, comes with a discussion guide from the Opportunity Agenda that addresses the concept of equal justice under the law, police-community relations, and racially motivated violence.) Pasquale (Junk, Rescue Me) finds just the right balance as Scott, who doesn’t get a pass just because he’s a white man who married a black woman and has a biracial teen. American Son wisely avoids clichés and melodrama, although there is some emotional manipulation, but it’s easy to look past that and immerse yourself in the onstage dilemma — and wonder what you would do if you were any of the four characters, or the most important missing fifth one, Jamal himself.

CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD

James Leeds (Joshua Jackson) and Sarah Norman (Lauren Ridloff) experience communications problems in Broadway revival of Children of a Lesser God (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 27, $29-$159
www.childrenofalessergodbroadway.com

Every so often a previously successful play returns to Broadway in a revival that makes you wonder not only why it’s back but what the heck made it so special in the first place. Such is the case with Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God, which just announced an early closing date of May 27 at Studio 54. Medoff wrote the play specifically for deaf actress Phyllis Frelich, loosely based on her real-life relationship with her husband, Robert Steinberg. The original 1980 production ran at the Longacre Theatre for more than two years and was nominated for four Tonys, winning Best Play, Best Actress (Frelich), and Best Actor (John Rubinstein). The British edition won the Olivier for Best New Play as well as Best Actress (Elizabeth Quinn) and Best Actor (Trevor Eve). And the 1986 film version was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and winning for Best Actress (Marlee Matlin). So went wrong this time around? Where should I begin?

There’s a whole lot of sitting around in ill-fated revival at Studio 54 (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Kenny Leon’s revival is stultifyingly dull — dare I say tone-deaf — as it explores the relationship between James Leeds (Drama League–nominated Joshua Jackson), a speech teacher at a school for the deaf, and Sarah Norman (Tony-nominated Lauren Ridloff), a twenty-six-year-old maid at the school who refuses to verbalize and fiercely rejects any attempt to help her do so. Sarah sees learning to speak as a betrayal of the nonhearing world she is proudly a part of, while James can’t understand why she wouldn’t want to speak or even use the latest technology that might allow her to at least pick up vibrations of sound. Very quickly, James falls for Sarah — well, it’s more like he stalks her — which upsets Sarah’s best friend, Orin (John McGinty), as well as the jealous Lydia (Treshelle Edmond), both students at the school. It also alarms the principal, Mr. Franklin (Anthony Edwards). In their Broadway debuts, Jackson (The Affair, Fringe) speaks too loudly and enunciates too clearly, never varying his speech pattern regardless of what he’s saying to whom, and Emmy winner Edwards speaks too softly, making it hard to hear much of what he has to say. All signed words are spoken out loud by the hearing actor being signed to, while all spoken words are shown in supertitles that are not always in sync with what is being said, often slightly ahead of the action. Whether all this is deliberate or not — Is the hearing world out of sync with the nonhearing? Does the experience of the hearing audience in such straits echo the experience of the nonhearing, faced with bad closed captions? — it just doesn’t work here. The sappy songs by Stevie Wonder and Wings don’t help, nor does Branford Marsalis’s tepid incidental music. It all feels more like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie of the week than a Broadway production with lofty ticket prices. Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, and Emmy winner Derek McLane’s set consists of multiple open doorways that lead nowhere, least of all the exit. The title of the play comes from the “Passing of Arthur” section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which now doubles as the passing of this well-meaning but hackneyed revival, after a mere 23 previews and, coincidentally enough, 54 regular performances at Studio 54.

AUGUST WILSON MONOLOGUE COMPETITION

monologue competition helps keep August Wilsons legacy alive

Annual monologue competition helps keep August Wilson’s tremendous legacy alive

Who: High school students from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Seattle
What: Seventh annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Where: August Wilson Theatre, 245 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
When: Monday, May 4, free, 7:00
Why: The finals for the 2015 August Wilson Monologue Competition will take the stage May 4 at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway, honoring the late, legendary playwright by performing two-to-three-minute excerpts from his works, the ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle that includes such modern classics as The Piano Lesson, Fences, Two Trains Running, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Gem of the Ocean. The finalists, two from each city, will work with longtime Wilson collaborators Kenny Leon and Todd Kreidler on their monologue and also get the opportunity to take in Something Rotten! The judges for the annual event, which began in 2007, are Crystal Dickinson, Brandon J. Dirden, David Gallo, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Pauletta Washington. The winner receives $1,500, with $1,000 for the runner-up and $500 for honorable mention. The evening will also include a live performance by musician Guy Davis.

HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME: AN ORIGINAL MUSICAL

New musical uses Tupac Shakur’s lyrics to tell contemporary tale of hard life (photo by Joan Marcus)

Palace Theatre
1654 Broadway at West 47th St.
Thursday – Tuesday through January 4, $67.75 – $184.25
www.hollerifyahearme.com

The new musical Holler If Ya Hear Me might be based on the songs of Tupac Shakur, but it does not tell the life story of the controversial West Coast rapper who was shot and killed in a Las Vegas drive-by in 1996 at the age of twenty-five. Instead, book writer Todd Kreidler — introduced to Shakur’s music by friend and mentor August Wilson — uses Shakur’s lyrics to share a contemporary tale about life in a ghetto in an unnamed Midwestern industrial city. As the play opens, John (Slam star Saul Williams) descends from the heavens in a jail cell, evoking Shakur’s several stints in prison, while delivering the East Harlem native’s “My Block,” soon joined by the company, setting the mood with the posthumously released song about guns, crack, black-on-black crime, unemployment, economic hardship, and racism. After his innocent brother, Benny (Donald Webber Jr.), is shot and killed, Vertus (Christopher Jackson) is determined to get even with the members of the 4-5 gang who took out Benny, angering his mother (Tonya Weston), alienating his girlfriend, Corinne (Saycon Sengbloh), and energizing young Anthony (Dyllon Burnside), who wants revenge as well. Meanwhile, the moody, humorless John is looking to go straight, getting a job working in Griffy’s (Ben Thompson) car-salvage business, where Benny used to work, planning with the white Griffy to get out of the neighborhood together. Through it all, a decrepit old man (John Earl Jelks) calls for peace by writing on walls and preaching through a megaphone.

John (Saul Williams) and Darius (Joshua Boone) get down to serious business as Anthony (Dyllon Burnside) looks on in HOLLER IF YA HEAR ME (photo by Joan Marcus)

The first act of Holler If Ya Hear Me is a mess, with a confusing narrative and point of view, a kind of mishmash of West Side Story and In the Heights, but director Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, Stick Fly) brings things together in act two, focusing more on the individual stories of John, Griffy, and especially Vertus, with stand-out performances by Williams, Thompson, and Jackson. Daryl Waters’s orchestrations too often emphasize Shakur’s background use of R&B elements, Broadway-fying such songs as “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” “Me Against the World,” “Dear Mama,” and “Unconditional Love”; Wayne Cilento’s (Wicked, Jersey Girls) choreography is almost nonexistent; and Edward Pierce’s set design is essentially a bare stage with stoops and a fenced-in salvage show occasionally, sometimes randomly, wheeled in, but Leon and the company still manage to pull it all off in the end while setting a new high for the use of the N-bomb on the Great White Way. The Palace Theatre itself has been transformed for the show, with stadium seating in the front of the tiny orchestra, while the rear has been turned into an interactive exhibition curated by the National Museum of Hip-Hop.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) and Ruth (Sophie Okonedo) are just trying to survive day to day in stellar revival of A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 15, $67 – $149
www.raisinbroadway.com

Broadway revivals are often about star power, still-relevant socioeconomic or –political issues, or inventive staging of a familiar classic. But Kenny Leon’s new version of A Raisin in the Sun goes back to the very creation of this fifty-five-year-old American drama, celebrating its fascinating author, Lorraine Hansberry. As patrons enter the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, an interview with Hansberry, the first African American woman to have a work produced on Broadway, is being broadcast on the sound system. Each Playbill comes with an additional pamphlet that reprints “Sweet Lorraine,” James Baldwin’s 1969 Esquire remembrance of Hansberry — who died in 1965 at the age of thirty-four — in which he writes, “Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them. But, in Raisin, black people recognized that house and all the people in it — the mother, the son, the daughter, and the daughter-in-law — and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the streets.” Leon’s production, and the extremely talented cast, honors every word of the play, which doesn’t feel old-fashioned in any way.

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) explains his questionable plans to his mother (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) in A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Oscar and Tony winner Denzel Washington stars as Walter Lee Younger, a dreamer trying to lift his family out of poverty in their cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Every morning there’s a battle to get to the bathroom across the hall, shared by everyone on the floor. Walter’s mother, Lena (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), is expecting a $10,000 insurance check for her recently deceased husband. While Walter wants to invest it in a liquor store with his friends Bobo (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and the never-seen Willy Harris, Walter’s hardworking wife, Ruth (Sophie Okonedo), wants to put it to far more practical use. Also awaiting the money are Walter and Ruth’s son, Travis (Bryce Clyde Jenkins), who sleeps on the couch, and Walter’s sister, Beneatha (Anika Noni Rose), who lives with them as well and wants to become a doctor. As Beneatha spends time with two different men, the assimilating George Murchison (Jason Dirden) and Joseph Asagai (Sean Patrick Thomas), who introduces her to her African roots, Lena considers moving the family to all-white Clybourne Park, leading to a visit by neighborhood leader Karl Lindner (David Cromer), setting in motion a series of events that, with a delicate balance of humor and tragedy, intelligently capture the black experience in mid-twentieth-century America. (A Raisin in the Sun was a direct influence on Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park.)

A representative from Clybourne Park (Karl Lindner) has some surprising news for the Younger family (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Washington (Fences, Julius Caesar), in a role created by Sidney Poitier first onstage and then in the 1961 film, is a whirlwind as Walter, practically dancing as he weaves his way through Mark Thompson’s apartment set, his gait displaying a slight jump, his leg often shaking in anticipation of making things better for him and his family. Okonedo embodies the sadness of the everyday drudgery her life encompasses, her eyes tired before their time, heavy with what could have been. Jackson is a fireball as the caring matriarch who wants to see her children and grandson succeed. Hansberry’s words flow like poetry as the Youngers’ path is continually blocked, evoking the Langston Hughes poem that gave the work its title, “A Dream Deferred”: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?” It was only ten years ago that Leon brought A Raisin in the Sun to the Royale, with a cast that included Sean Combs, Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, and Sanaa Lathan, but this stellar current production makes the previous one but a distant memory, injecting fresh new life into one of Broadway’s most historically and socially important works.

STICK FLY

The LeVay clan has gathered for what will become a very stormy weekend on Martha’s Vineyard in STICK FLY

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through February 28, $35 – $131.50
www.stickflybroadway.com

Race and class collide in both familiar and unique ways in Lydia R. Diamond’s emotionally charged dysfunctional family drama, Stick Fly. The LeVays are gathering for their annual weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, but things are a little different this year. Younger son Kent (Psych’s Dulé Hill) is bringing his fiancée, Taylor (Cold Case’s Tracie Thoms), the daughter of a prestigious and respected cultural intellectual, to meet the clan, and eldest son Flip (Mekhi Phifer in his Broadway debut) will be introducing his new girlfriend, Kimber (Rosie Benton), a well-off white woman who works with troubled inner-city youth. Meanwhile, stubborn patriarch Joe (Tony and Obie winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a prominent neurosurgeon, has arrived without his wife, claiming she will be coming later. In addition, the LeVays’ longtime maid, Miss Ellie, is seriously ill and has sent her daughter, Cheryl (Ruined’s Condola Rashad), to take care of everyone in her stead. Joe is clearly proud of Flip, a successful plastic surgeon, but he is disappointed in Kent, whom Taylor, an entomologist, calls Spoon and Joe considers a failed ne’er-do-well even when he tells everyone that his first novel is going to be published by a major house. As Taylor and Kimber do battle over the rich and the poor, the self-centered Flip tries to hide a previous dalliance with Taylor. But in the middle of it all is Cheryl, an intelligent, prideful young woman who understands a lot more than she lets on but is about to get the shock of her life.

Joe LeVay (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) discusses insects and more with Taylor (Tracie Thoms) in insightful new Broadway drama

Produced and composed by Alicia Keys and directed by Kenny Leon, who is also currently helming Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in The Mountaintop, Stick Fly is an involving drama with sharp dialogue, an incisive sense of humor, and a solid cast. Detroit native Diamond, a Steppenwolf veteran making her Broadway debut, has written a compelling tale that flirts with clichés but usually manages to skirt just around them. David Gallo’s inventive set features a carefully sliced wall that allows the kitchen to be seen through the living room, cutting through works of art (by the likes of Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat) in a way that echoes the cross-cultural arguments that continue among the characters. Rashad, the daughter of actress Phyllis Rashad and former NFL wide receiver and broadcaster Ahmad Rashad, is particularly effective as Cheryl, who sees through a lot of the LeVay facade as she goes about her menial duties, being treated differently by everyone in the house, a dramatic device that helps to define the inherent biases in each of the characters. “Racism, discrimination, whatever,” Kimber says at one point. “You can’t imply that it exists. It’s like we’re supposed to have come so far that it’s taboo to suggest we have any further to go.” Stick Fly offers a fascinating counterpart to Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, which is currently running at the Booth Theatre. While the former tells the story of a Huxtable-like wealthy black family meeting on the Vineyard, the latter focuses on a rich white family gathering together in Palm Springs, each group dealing with long-simmering insecurities, a book written by one of the adult children, and a not necessarily well-hidden (to the audience) secret that explodes in the second act. But each play handles their situations differently, especially at the very end. Seen together, they offer intriguing insight into the state of the American family, and perhaps not coincidentally they are two of the best plays on Broadway right now.