64 years late, ‘Trouble in Mind’ makes Broadway debut, as timely as ever

Link to original post – Click Here
Click the link below to play the video

https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/on-stage-episodes/2021/11/07/on-stage-64-years-late—trouble-in-mind–makes-broadway-debut–as-timely-as-ever?cid=share_clip

The Broadway Premiere Of Trouble In Mind Starring LaChanze And A First Look Portrait Of The Fabulous Cast

Link to original post – Click Here

Roundabout Theatre Company (Todd Haimes, Artistic Director/CEO) is pleased to share a first look portrait of the cast of the Broadway premiere of Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress.

Starring Tony & Emmy Award-winner LaChanze and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright.

 


The photo was shot on stage at the American Airlines Theatre (227 West 42nd Street) where the show will begin previews on Friday, October 29 ahead of an opening set for Thursday, November 18, 2021. This is a limited engagement through Sunday, January 9, 2022.

Trouble in Mind stars LaChanze as “Wiletta”, Michael Zegen as “Al Manners”, Chuck Cooper as “Sheldon Forrester”, Danielle Campbell as “Judy Sears”, Jessica Frances Dukes as “Millie Davis”, Brandon Micheal Hall as “John Nevins”, Simon Jones as “Henry”, Alex Mickiewicz as “Eddie Fenton” and Don Stephenson as “Bill O’Wray”.

The design team includes Arnulfo Maldonado (Sets), Emilio Sosa (Costumes), Kathy A. Perkins (Lights),

Dan Moses Schreier (Sound), Cookie Jordan (Hair & Wigs) and Nona Hendryx (Original Music).

Roundabout’s production of Trouble in Mind comes to Broadway following two recent development readings with director Charles Randolph-Wright. Roundabout audiences will know the work of playwright Alice Childress from the recent online reading of her play, Wine in the Wilderness, as part of Roundabout’s multi-year The Refocus Project, presented in association with Black Theatre United, to spotlight twentieth-century Black plays and their playwrights.

Following an experienced Black stage actress through rehearsals of a major Broadway production, Alice Childress’s wry and moving look at racism, identity, and ego in the world of New York theatre opened to acclaim Off-Broadway in 1955. At the forefront of both the Civil Rights and feminist movements, the prescient Trouble in Mind was announced to move to Broadway in 1957…in a production that never came to be

Roundabout is thrilled to welcome back many of these actors to their stages including Michael Zegen who made his Roundabout debut in Bad Jews at its Underground production in 2012, which then transferred to the Laura Pels in 2013 and Tony Award-winner Chuck Cooper who made his Roundabout debut in the 2016 production of The Cherry Orchard at American Airlines Theatre. Additionally, Alex Mickiewicz was last seen at Roundabout in The Last Match (2017) and Simon Jones and Don Stephenson were both last seen at Roundabout in Death Takes a Holiday (2011).

LaChanze is a founding member of Black Theatre United; she returns to Broadway following A Christmas Carol (2019) and Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018), for which she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.

 

 

Performances

Preview performances of Trouble in Mind will play Tuesday through Saturday evening at 8:00 PM with Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2:00 PM and Sunday matinees at 3:00 PM. Regular performances after opening night will play Tuesday and Thursday evening at 7:00 PM, and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening at 8:00 PM, with Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2:00 PM and Sunday matinees at 3:00 PM.

Biographies

LaChanze (Wiletta – she/her/them/they) is an award-winning actress who brings an exhilarating and electrifying presence to any stage she touches. Blessed with a powerful mezzo-soprano singing voice and a commanding presence, she consistently receives high praises from fans, peers and the industry at-large. Armed with the gift for dramatic storytelling, a sultry vocal dexterity, and bringing complex female heroines to life, audiences sit up and take notice of LaChanze—whether in a hit Broadway production, television show, film or on concert stages.

Her most recent TV credits include a recurring as Anne in NBC’s “The Blacklist” opposite James Spader and in Amazon Prime’s “The Underground Railroad,” which was released earlier this year. She recurred in the CBS All Access hit show “The Good Fight” and appeared in the award-winning HBO special “The Night Of,” “Person Of Interest,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “One Life To Live,” “Lucy,” “Sex And The City,” “The Cosby Show,” “The Cosby Mysteries” and “New York Undercover.”

On the film side, she stars in writer/director Marishka Phillips’ suspense- filled film Melinda. She appeared in the award-winning movie The Help sharing the screen with legendary actress Cicely Tyson (SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture). Other films include former President Obama film picks for 2019 Diane, A Bitter Pill, Side Effects, For Love Or Money, Leap Of Faith, My New Gun, and the Disney animated feature film Hercules. LaChanze stepped onto stage 28 Broadway seasons ago, giving the original production of Once On This Island its beating and unforgettable heart, creating the role of lovelorn peasant girl Ti Moune. She won her first Tony Award for giving a voice to Celie, the unlikely heroine of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the musical’s original staging.

Shortly after, she captured an Emmy Award for her riveting performance in the award-winning PBS special Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise. She starred in playwright Jack Thorne’s A Christmas Carol as the Ghost of Christmas Present/Mrs. Fezziwig. Prior, she originated Augusta’s role in two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s A Secret Life of Bees, for which she landed an AUDELCO Award for Leading Actress in a Musical. She gave a spellbinding performance in the high voltage Broadway’s Summer The Donna Summer Musical.

In creating Donna Summers’ nostalgia, she landed nominations for the 2018 Tony Award nomination for Leading Actress in a Musical, 2018 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Actress in a Musical and 2018 Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance Award. Other Broadway credits include If/ThenRagtimeCompany, and Uptown It’s Hot. Some of her Off-Broadway credits include The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (Drama Desk nomination), Dessa Rose (Obie Award), Inked BabySpunk and From The Mississippi Delta. LaChanze brings her original, one-of-a-kind, one-woman show, Feeling Good, to popular venues touching the hearts of audiences worldwide. This electric and highly praised tour mixes the perfect blend of emotional intensity with sultry vocals. Fans willing to take the ride and feel every pain, joy, and excitement LaChanze feels all through her life’s autobiographical journey with music and words.

Alice Childress finally gets to make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway

Link to original post – Click Here

[Photo Credit: – Sara Krulwhich/The New York Times]
From left: Chuck Cooper, LaChanze Campbell and Michael Zegen in “Trouble in Mind” at the American Airlines Theatre in New York on October 28, 2021.

 

Wiletta Mayer walks into the theater already knowing how things will go. Smartly dressed, attractive and middle-aged (don’t ask for a number, because “a woman that’ll tell her age will tell anything”), she is a veteran actress who has played maids and mammies and knows how to cater to white directors and producers. You can call it “Uncle Tomming.” Or you can call it plain common sense. Either way, it’s a living.

Until enough is enough.

Alice Childress created Wiletta Mayer, the protagonist of her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” to paint a realistic portrait of what it was to be Black in the theater industry. Or to be more accurate: She wanted to portray what it is to be Black in theater, because 66 years later, as the play opens on Broadway this month in a Roundabout Theater Company production, the words Childress wrote remain just as relevant.

And yet this author and play, a comedy-drama about an interracial cast rehearsing an anti-lynching play written by a white author and led by a white director, haven’t gotten their proper due in the decades since its premiere. Childress was supposed to be the first Black female playwright on Broadway, with a play critiquing the racism and misogyny of the theater industry.

Thanks to interfering white theatermakers and a Broadway unwelcoming to challenging Black art, things didn’t turn out as planned. But the content of the play, and its troubled production history, prove how rightly “Trouble in Mind” and its author should be celebrated as part of the canon.

In the play, Wiletta arrives for her part in “Chaos in Belleville” alongside a young Black actor named John; an older Black actor named Sheldon; a younger Black actress named Millie; and two white actors, Judy, a well-meaning yet naive Yale graduate, and Bill, a neurotic character actor. The play within the play is about a Black man who dares to vote and is killed for it.

During rehearsals, Wiletta tries to give newcomer John tips on how to survive as a Black actor in the business, but her own advice fails when the white director, Al Manners, pushes her to perpetuate stereotypes.

It’s a familiar scenario, one Childress encountered herself as a young actress in the 1944 Broadway production of “Anna Lucasta.” She based Wiletta on character actress Georgia Burke, who appeared with her in that production. Like Wiletta, Burke had also done her fair share of mammy roles, and she would later appear in the original Broadway “Porgy and Bess.”

Burke had problems with the director of “Anna Lucasta,” but Childress knew her to complain only to her fellow Black actors; when it came to white directors and producers, she kept quiet for the sake of her career.

In “Trouble in Mind,” Childress wrote a version of Burke who finally had to speak up.

“Darling, don’t think. You’re great until you start thinking,” Al Manners says to Wiletta during rehearsals. That kind of condescending treatment may have been par for the course for Black theater performers. Childress, however, was uncompromising.

“She was a woman of amazing integrity,” said Kathy Perkins, Childress’ friend and the editor of a major anthology of her plays. (She is also the lighting designer for Roundabout’s production.) “She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”

It’s this integrity — or, more accurately, the times choking a great writer of integrity — that cost Childress Broadway. In an ironic echo of the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when “Trouble in Mind” was slated for its off-Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.

The play premiered Nov. 5, 1955, at Greenwich Mews Theater and ran for 91 performances.

But that version isn’t the version we know today.

The white producers were concerned about the play’s ending, which they thought was too negative. According to Perkins, as a relatively new playwright, Childress was intimidated by these experienced producers.

And then there was the rest of the cast and crew to think about. Childress was a fierce advocate for unions and workers’ rights, and feared that pulling the play would cost everyone their jobs. So she conceded, providing an ending of reconciliation and racial harmony, even though she maintained that it was unrealistic.

The New York Times praised the play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire” — except for the ending. Childress always regretted the change, and said she’d never compromise her artistic integrity again. So when “Trouble in Mind” was optioned for Broadway with the happy ending and a new title (“So Early Monday Morning”), Childress refused. She would have been the first Black female playwright to see her work there; instead, that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry four years later, for “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Childress, who died in 1994, never had the financial success nor popular recognition that her work merited in her lifetime. It’s unfortunate because her plays are works of merit.

Many of her works — such as “Florence” (1949), “Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” (1966) and “Wine in the Wilderness” (1969) — are confrontational without being pandering or preachy. Not simply about race, they are also about gender and class and artistry, and challenge their audiences to look at their own prejudices and misconceptions. (Theater for a New Audience is reviving “Wedding Band,” a tale of interracial love set amid the 1918 flu pandemic, off-Broadway this spring.)

And they’re clever. The meta structure of “Trouble in Mind” makes Childress’ satire especially poignant; it’s both explicitly biting and subtly searing.

One reason Childress is often left out of conversations about the American canon is her style. In an essay in “The Cambridge Companion to African-American Theater,” historian and dramaturge Adrienne Macki Braconi calls Childress a “transitional” writer, unheralded because her work reflects “the conventions of dramatic realism.”

“Critics often overlook their subtle variations on the form, including such innovations as bold thematic content; assertive, complex female characters; and a focus on lower-class and middle-class blacks,” Macki Braconi wrote of Childress and writer Eulalie Spence.

Sandra Shannon, a scholar of Black theater and emeritus professor of African American literature at Howard University, maintained that Childress’ blend of naturalistic dialogue and social commentary put her “at the top of her game” among playwrights in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Her plays, Shannon said, “raise awareness, stop short of just getting out and marching in the streets.”

And La Vinia Delois Jennings, author of the 1995 book “Alice Childress” and a distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Tennessee, pointed out the “dynamism” of Childress’ works, which so often feature Black women taking agency. The stereotypical trope of the angry Black woman gets turned on its head, Jennings said, proving that anger can be “liberating — a force that brings about change.”

But for all of Childress’ dynamism, it still took over 60 years to get her work to a Broadway stage.

Charles Randolph-Wright, who will be directing the Broadway production, said he has been eyeing this play for the big stage for more than a decade.

On June 20, 2011, a nonprofit called Project1Voice hosted an event in which 19 theaters across the country did readings of “Trouble in Mind.” Randolph-Wright directed a Roundabout reading at the American Airlines Theater, which included André De Shields, Leslie Uggams, Bill Irwin and LaChanze, who will be starring as Wiletta in the full production at the same Broadway venue.

“I’ll never forget everyone coming up to me saying, ‘Did you rewrite this?’ and I was like, ‘No, she wrote this in 1955.’ And they said, ‘But you tweaked it —’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t touch one thing,” Randolph-Wright explained.

After all, theater insiders and outsiders are still loudly calling for improved representation more than a half-century later.

“There’s been a false sense of progress. That progress has been in fits and starts,” Shannon said. “The same issues that Childress deals with, or dealt with in the 1950s with ‘Trouble in Mind,’ have always been bubbling beneath the surface. They’ve never gone away.”

In one scene in the play, Manners says, “I want truth. What is truth? Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe, that is all. You must have integrity about your work.”

Although the statement comes from a flawed character, the sentiment is Childress all the way. Perkins said that at the end of the day, Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she wrote for only herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.

Randolph-Wright said he thinks of the late John Lewis when he approaches the play. “It is ‘good trouble,’” he said, referring to the call to action made famous by the activist and congressman. “It agitates, it illuminates, it makes you laugh, it’s entertaining.”

But he hopes this production will only be the beginning — that audiences will learn more about Childress’ work, and that she and other Black writers will get greater recognition for their contributions to the art form. Because this moment — after Black Lives Matter and “We See You, White American Theater,” and when seven new Broadway plays this fall are by Black writers — is perfect for Childress, but also for Spence and Ed Bullins and Angelina Weld Grimké and other Black playwrights past and present.

So will change really come this time around? The version of “Trouble in Mind” that’s finally arriving on Broadway ends inconclusively, not optimistically. The ending that Childress’ producers rejected back in 1955 seems right for right now.

The debut of ‘Trouble in Mind’ reveals progress — and enduring racism — on Broadway

Link to original post – Click Here
Photo Credit: Marc J. Franklin

Sixty years after producers abandoned it as a poor commercial risk, Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” a metadrama about discrimination, stereotyping and liberalism in American theater, finally debuted on Broadway on Friday. The play first hit the stage in 1955, a year marked by the murder of Emmett Till, the publication of James Baldwin’s collection of essays “Notes of a Native Son” and Rosa Parks’s refusal to vacate her seat for a White passenger in the colored section of a Montgomery, Ala., bus, which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Its origins lay in the coordinated grass-roots response to racial terror. Black dramatists joined demands for civil rights by staging acts of self-determination. “Trouble in Mind” underscored how racism shaped the characters and the stories of the American theater, and it would have been the first play by a Black woman on the Great White Way. But when Childress refused to make changes to the play that would have weakened its anti-racism message, producers lost interest.

Now as the country undergoes another racial reckoning, Childress’s play is finally getting its moment. Today, seemingly better-reconciled to our past, we are more able to grapple with American racism. This comes even as the same racial violence and working conditions that troubled Childress persist today.

Childress began her career as an actor, writer, director and board member with the American Negro Theatre (ANT). The ANT set up shop in a basement in New York’s Schomburg Center and served as a training ground for many accomplished Black actors, Childress among them. Childress appeared in the ANT’s production of Philip Yordan’s “Anna Lucasta” in 1944. The play, originally written for a White cast, moved from Harlem to Broadway and also featured Hilda Simms, Frederick O’Neal, Earle Hyman and Canada Lee.

Kathy Perkins, lighting designer of the 2021 Roundabout Theatre’s production of “Trouble in Mind,” who also edited a collection of Childress’s plays, recalled, “When I interviewed Sidney Poitier, he said he saw Childress act before he met her, and he was just blown away by her acting skills. Everybody who saw her perform said she was such an amazing actress.”

Yet Childress’s acting career was derailed by the color codes that governed casting. As Perkins explained, “She was too light.” Casting for many shows required that an African American actor appear prototypically Black. At the same time, segregation depended on Black people not being able to play White roles. Childress found herself in a racial no-woman’s-land.

Playwright Alice Childress is photographed with the stars of her interracial love story, “Wedding Band,” Ruby Dee and James Broderick, in 1972. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

This reality taught Childress about the costs of making theater and inspired her to write “Trouble in Mind” with an eye toward showcasing the racism in the theater.

A play within a play, Childress’s comedy depicts characters rehearsing a drama called “Chaos in Belleville” about a lynching that takes place in a White southern community. The outside world seeps into the rehearsal room through direct references to national events, school desegregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The main character, Wiletta Mayer, a veteran actress, clashes with the director, Al Manners, over how to interpret her role as a sharecropper’s wife. As written, Mayer’s role depicts a stereotypical self-sacrificing and submissive Black mother.

Rather than drawing inspiration from the women leading the grass-roots movements against racial violence and for civil rights, Mayer’s character often finds herself so overwhelmed she sings spirituals — and not in the tradition of protest songs inspired by the voices of Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. Instead Mayer’s character cares more about social customs than Black people’s freedom. But at the climax of the play, Mayer has an epiphany, questioning her character’s willingness to accommodate others at the expense of her son.

After casting the play and rehearsing for weeks, the producers of the 1955 production threatened to cancel the show if Childress did not provide a happy ending. The original and published version of the play ends with Mayer and Manners in a standoff that threatens to doom the show. Mayer refuses to play the part as written and Manners, frustrated, ends rehearsal early and sends the cast home. Childress acceded to the demand, and revised the script to conclude with a reconciliation between the characters. The off-Broadway production changed Mayer’s act of self-determination to one of reconciliation.

The production of “Trouble in Mind” opened on Nov. 4, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, located in the basement of the Village Presbyterian Church. With Clarice Taylor, Childress directed the play, which ran for 91 performances. Although it received rave reviews and garnered interest from Broadway producer Edward Eliscu, Childress felt regret.

She recalled in an interview with theater historian James Hatch, “They had me rewrite for two years until I couldn’t recognize the play one way or the other. … Then after one person dropped it, I think another person dropped it and then it just sat there and I felt like I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

Childress reinstated the original ending to help restore her vision — but at the cost of reaching Broadway. The play was abandoned as a poor commercial risk.

In 1977, actor Clarence Muse, left, ex officio patriarch of the Fourth Annual Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame ceremony, presents the first Paul Robeson award to Alice Childress. (OAT/AP)

Broadway would not feature a play written by a Black woman until Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1959.

But in 2021, “Trouble in Mind” is getting its moment on Broadway. The theater world’s issues with race have not abated in the 66 years since the play debuted. Black playwrights have repeatedly staged plays about their struggle to make innovative and commercially viable art.

George C. Wolf’s “Colored Museum,” which premiered in 1986, critiqued formulaic depictions of Black people onstage with a scene entitled, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play.” Brenden Jacobs-Jenkins’s, “An Octoroon,” presented by Soho Rep in 2014, begins with a Black playwright delivering a monologue about expectations for race onstage.

Before the coronavirus pandemic shutdown in 2020, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview” also displayed the tension between artists’ renderings of Black people onstage and audiences’ expectations. The first act shows a Black family in a comedic kitchen-sink drama. Turning everything on its head, the second act presents an absurdist interaction between an onstage audience and the Black family. The Black family replays the drama, now with the onstage audience intervening, critiquing, disrupting and revising the show. In the final scene, “Fairview” breaks the fourth wall and asks White members of the audience to acknowledge the role viewers play in what unfolds onstage. The interaction between the actors and the audience encourages spectators to rethink how we see Black performers.

After the murder of George Floyd and the death of Breonna Taylor, theater artists joined in the global call for racial justice. A coalition of theater makers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) united under the name, We See You White American Theatre (WSYWAT), and wrote a manifesto in 2020 that sought more accountability in the composition of boards, audience cultivation and season planning.

They forced the theater world to respond. As theaters reopened this fall, Broadway boasts seven plays by Black people, including “Trouble in Mind.”

It will be telling how audiences engage with the deep irony of Childress’s play. The racial violence that framed the 1955 production still exists and American theater remains challenged by questions of inclusion. Yet as lighting designer Perkins notes, “We have a different audience today than they did in the ’50s. It’s a more diverse audience.” While the ending of Childress’s play rendered it a poor commercial risk in 1955, producers seem to have calculated that the risk of not seeing Black people onstage in 2021 is much greater.

Charles Randolph-Wright, Debra Martin Chase and Olympian Brian Boitano Team for Netflix Ice Skating Movie

Link to original post – Click Here

Randolph-Wright and Boitano: AP / Martin Chase: Everett Collection

Charles Randolph-WrightDebra Martin Chase and Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano have teamed to produce the Netflix family movie “Take the Ice,” set in the world of synchronized ice skating.

Written by Deborah Swisher, “Take the Ice” follows a rebellious 15-year-old named Tisha Moore, who has dreamed of becoming an ice skater her entire life. According to the film’s logline, however, the closest the Black girl from Brooklyn has come is dazzling people with her roller skating routines while busking in the park. When Tisha gets the opportunity to join a local synchronized ice skating team, she is forced to come to terms with the root of her rebellious ways and must learn to trust others to achieve her dream of shining on the ice.

Randolph-Wright — whose career in TV, film and theater includes executive producing and directing the OWN series “Delilah,” “Greenleaf” and the hit show “Motown: The Musical” — will also direct the movie.

In a statement announcing the project, Randolph-Wright said: “Years ago Brian Boitano and I were discussing the lack of ice skaters of color. We decided to create a film that would give inspiration and permission to take the ice to young athletes of color.”

“My dream is that years from now we will be watching television and hear from an Olympian that this film opened the door that they never imagined they could enter,” added the filmmaker, who will direct the classic Alice Childress play “Trouble in Mind” on Broadway this fall.

Martin Chase is the producing power behind CBS’ “The Equalizer,” “True Spirit,” “Harriet,” “The Princess Diaries,” “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and more.

“This movie will remind us that with determination, focus and hard work we each have the power to make our biggest dreams come true,” she said. “I am so happy to be working with my longtime friends Naketha Mattocks and Charles Randolph-Wright and ice skating icon Brian Boitano. It’s the dream team for this movie.”

In addition to producing the film, Boitano — who won the gold medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and also represented the U.S. in 1984 and 1994 — will also handle the movie’s choreography. An open casting call for the film’s teen skaters is now underway.

“I am excited to be a part of a movie that will bring attention to the sport of synchronized skating,” Boitano said. “I also hope that kids and teens, who don’t typically see themselves represented in the traditional skating world, will be inspired to pursue their dreams.”

Juneteenth, OWN’s “Delilah”, and Stephanie Mills

Link to original post – Click Here 

Arena Stage to roar back with mix of bubbly and soul

Link to original post – Click Here

In July 2022, the world-premiere musical American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words — filled with soaring new melodies and powered by Douglass’s own speeches and writings — will make its debut in the Kreeger Theater. Charles Randolph-Wright (Broadway’s Motown the Musical, Arena’s Born For This: The BeBe Winans Story) returns to Arena with this new work that celebrates the revolutionary legacy of one of history’s first freedom fighters. Co-written and featuring new music by Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Marcus Hummon, this daring and heart-stirring musical dramatizes Douglass as a young, fierce abolitionist and distinguished orator.

American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words
Co-written and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright
Co-written and music by Marcus Hummon
In the Kreeger Theater | July 15 – August 28, 2022

R&B icon Stephanie Mills returns with a message of Black empowerment — and a music video filmed in uptown Charlotte

Link to original post – Click Here

New Series ‘Delilah’ Reflects Black America In A Way Not Normally Seen On Screen, Says Its Star

Link to original post – Click Here

Jill Marie Jones and Maahra Hill star in “Delilah.” SCREENSHOT – COURTESY OWN

Female attorneys going head to head in a heated courtroom battle isn’t something often seen on television.

Now imagine that the two women standing on opposite sides of the case are best friends.

This is the premise of Delilah, a new series airing on OWN.

The narrative follows Delilah Connolly, a headstrong, highly principled lawyer who left a demanding white-shoe law firm a decade ago, hanging up her own shingle so she could make raising her kids her #1 priority. Now, she takes on cases the big firms ignore, often going head-to-head with the powerful and privileged as she fights for the disenfranchised.

Craig Wright, who created and serves as Executive Producer on the series, says that in Delilah he and his team, “wanted to make something bigger and broader, and we wanted to ask more questions about where society’s headed, and how Black women and Black Americans are going to continue being a major part of the unfolding of American history.”

In the series, Maahra Hill (Black-ishHow to Get Away With Murder) stars as Delilah Connolly, with Jill Mare Jones (Girlfriends, Sleepy Hollow) playing her confidante and best friend Tamara Roberts.