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Charles Randolph-Wright on the Heroes Who Gave Him Permission to Dream

February 20, 2023/0 Comments/in Charles Randolph-Wright, For Television, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

The ‘Motown: The Musical’ director and ‘Delilah’ executive producer on the power of creative role models

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Charles Randolph-Wright speaks on stage at “Motown: The Musical” on April 30, 2015, in Hollywood. Credit: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Hollywood Pantages

Here, Randolph-Wright shares his thoughts on the heroes who gave him permission to forge his own creative path.

New musical honors Frederick Douglass’ life and writings

August 9, 2022/0 Comments/in American Prophet, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

July 30, 2022 | Written By Kara Thompson | AFRO News

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Frederick Douglass is famous in history for being an abolitionist leader and visionary. Although his life and writings are often taught about, his journey to becoming the icon that he was is not often discussed or shown.

The new musical at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, “American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words,” seeks to explore the details of Douglass’s life from illiterate slave to a prominent national figure, with a focus on his evolution as a man and abolitionist.

“American Prophet” came to be when director Charles Randolph-Wright went to Nashville, Tenn. to meet songwriter Marcus Hummon and hear some songs he had written as part of a project he was working on about Frederick Douglass. From the very first song, the music blew Randolph-Wright away.

“I thought this is the way to tell this story right now because music does something that nothing else can do,” he said. “Music can heal. Music gives a different voice to things literally. And so I knew ‘wow. This is the way to tell the story right now.’”

The storyline will focus on Douglass’s growth as a person, writer, and prominent figure. It describes his struggle with taking up the mantle and becoming the person, or prophet, so many around him wanted him to be.

“It’s the younger Frederick, who had to discover who he was, how to do this, what is that,” said Randolph-Wright. “Music allows that, so it’s such a great way to get inside of him, to have him question, to have him wonder.”

It was important to Randolph-Wright that the audience gets to see Douglass differently than the white-haired statesman that is often depicted in photos of him.

“You get to see a journey of him questioning himself,” he said. “He’s on this pedestal for all of us, so you get to step up with him or he gets to step down with you. Whatever that is, you get to get inside of his journey.”

The show also highlights Douglass’s partnership with his wife, who was a huge part in his success, and someone typically kept in the periphery. Randolph-Wright was able to talk to some descendants of Frederick and Anna, who helped him learn more about Anna, since there is very little written about her.

“As is often the case with women and women in the movement, they’re not heard, they’re not seen and and there’s very little written about [Anna], so this musical allowed us to give her a voice and a musical voice, a physical voice,” said Randolph-Wright.

Kristolyn Lloyd, who stars in American Prophet as Anna Douglass, holding her Grammy she won for her role in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway. (Photo Courtesy of AP Photos)

Kristolyn Lloyd, who plays Anna, is a stage and TV actress from the suburbs of Houston. She won both an Emmy and a Grammy for her performance in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway. In addition to her role on Broadway, she has credits for many off-Broadway performances, and TV credits on shows such as Elementary and Madam Secretary.

Playing the part of Frederick Douglass is Cornelius Smith Jr, who is an actor native to Detroit. He was nominated for a daytime Emmy for his role as Frankie Hubbard in the soap opera All My Children, and is most famous for portraying Marcus Walker on Scandal.

Cornelius Smith Jr. stars in the stage play, American Prophet, as Frederick Douglass. (Photo Courtesy of AP Photos)

“American Prophet” is Randolph-Wright’s 12 production at Arena Stage. The show runs July 15 through August 28 in the Kreeger Theater. You can purchase tickets at https://tickets.arenastage.org/events/32349.

In beguiling ‘American Prophet,’ Frederick Douglass lets freedom sing

August 8, 2022/0 Comments/in American Prophet, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

August 2, 2022 | Written By Peter Marks| The Washington Post

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To the grace notes in the oratory of 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, you can now add beguiling new ones, courtesy of the 21st-century composer Marcus Hummon. The songwriter infuses “American Prophet,” the exquisitely sung, melody-rich world premiere at Arena Stage, with gorgeous hymns that contextualize Douglass’s rise as a voice of conscience for a divided nation.

The new musical, with vivid central performances by Cornelius Smith Jr. and Kristolyn Lloyd as Frederick and Anna Douglass, channels Douglass’s power through some astute culling of his journalism, autobiographies and speeches. (Its subtitle is “Frederick Douglass in His Own Words.”) The conceit invests the work of Hummon and co-book writer Charles Randolph-Wright — who also supplies excellent direction — with historical accuracy. It also gives them a lyrical leg up, as there is undeniable music in Douglass’s elegantly persuasive turns of phrase.

“We need the storm, we need the whirlwind, and for the nation’s sake, we need the earthquake,” Douglass and the ensemble sing, in the stirring chorale, “We Need a Fire.” As a first-act finale, the song — incorporating some twists on Douglass’s phraseology — is a kind of motivational summation of the experiences of the young Douglass, after escaping slavery and making an extraordinary ascent to ever-greater influence. When the song is reprised at evening’s end, the lyrics will seem to travel through time in Arena’s Kreeger Theater to implore us to continue the fight against racism and injustice.

Thanks to a new musical, Frederick Douglass dances into pop culture

A worshipful dimension of “American Prophet” cannot be denied: Music director Joseph Joubert sits at a keyboard below the lip of the stage, his back to the audience, as if he were the church organist, and Arnulfo Maldonado’s terraced, wood-paneled set could support a heavenly choir. A sense of putting Douglass’s best foot forward carries over into the narrative, which is careful not to portray the great man as anything but dignified. It’s not so much a flaw on this rewarding evening as an indication of a need for some loosening up — more humor — in the show’s next incarnation. Some additional poetic license might also be called for to convey the toll Douglass’s outspokenness took on him and his family, for instance, and what vulnerability might be touched in such a strong-willed crusader, in such lethal times.

The musical chronicles the first half of Douglass’s life, from his enslaved childhood in Maryland, where he’s taught to read by a sympathetic White woman, to his activist years leading up to the Civil War and a White House encounter with Abraham Lincoln (Thomas Adrian Simpson). The backbone of the story — and according to the musical, the woman who reinforces his spine — is Anna, who is played by Lloyd with such dazzling presence that Douglass’s wife emerges as a star, too. (Costume designer Dede Ayite’s marvelous dresses, with pinched waists and full, flowing skirts, assist aptly in the magnetism.)

Kristolyn Lloyd and Cornelius Smith Jr. as Anna and Frederick Douglass in “American Prophet.” (Margot Schulman/Arena Stage)

Smith makes for a winningly virile, impassioned Douglass. The other star here is Hummon, a fixture in Nashville’s country music community, who has found a ravishing musical language to match Douglass’s. “American Prophet” started several years ago as a modest song cycle, performed in a Tennessee church, and the production’s roots in oratorio are still apparent. With jazz, blues and bluegrass motifs, his score abounds in authentic American flavors, underscoring a central point of “American Prophet”: that despite Douglass’s professed ambivalence about this country, he was not just a hero, he was an American hero.

Hummon grants Smith and Lloyd a radiant number at their first meeting at a Baltimore dance: “Children of the Same River,” about their common connection to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. And Chris Roberts, nuclear-charged as firebrand abolitionist John Brown, receives well-deserved opportunities to shake up an audience in the rousing “We Need a Fire,” as well as a spirit-raising anthem, “Hands,” to spur on Brown’s uprising.

The musical’s score, accompanied by a seven-member orchestra, often unfolds with only brief bits of dialogue. The approach requires the score to rapidly incorporate momentous pivots in the Douglasses’ story, such as his escape from slavery, or Anna’s involvement in the Underground Railroad. As a result, an audience member will reap the most satisfaction entering the Kreeger with some knowledge of Douglass’s astonishing life.

Cornelius Smith Jr. as Frederick Douglass and Chris Roberts as John Brown in “American Prophet.” (Margot Schulman)

And because so much of “American Prophet” hews to Douglass’s own words, any shift of focus is a bonus. One of the more interesting interludes is a musical account of how Douglass adopted his surname. In the Act 2 song “Mr. President,” too, Hummon has the inspired idea of musicalizing the regrets of three Black leaders who meet with Lincoln and make the mistake of not speaking their minds to him.

“We all come from somewhere else, Mr. President!” sings the trio (played by Christopher B. Portley, Correy West and Curtis Wiley), to the alluring choreography of Lorna Ventura. “That’s what we should have said!”

You get the sense in “American Prophet” that Douglass himself never left anything unsaid. It’s a credit now to this creative team that enshrining him in a musical means his words will never be unsung.

American Prophet, music and lyrics by Marcus Hummon, book by Hummon and Charles Randolph-Wright. Directed by Randolph-Wright. Choreography, Lorna Ventura; music direction and orchestrations, Joseph Joubert; set, Arnulfo Maldonado; costumes, Dede Ayite; lighting, Rui Rita; sound, Dan Moses Schreier. With Erica Aubrey, Cicily Daniels, Kanysha Williams, Christopher Michael Richardson, Kurt Boehm, Brendon Schaefer, Zoe Bryant. About 2 hours 15 minutes. Through Aug. 28 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. 202-488-3300. arenastage.org.

Frederick Douglass gets the Hamilton treatment with new musical

July 30, 2022/0 Comments/in American Prophet, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

July 30 , 2022 | Written By David Smith | The Guardian

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Cornelius Smith Jr as Frederick Douglass and the cast of American Prophet. Photograph: Arena Stage

For Kenneth Morris, sitting in a darkened theatre among hundreds of people, it was a moment of communion with a man he never met but whose light he carries wherever he goes.

Morris is the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, orator and polymath. On Thursday he joined a Washington audience that included the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the world premiere of American Prophet, a stage musical powered by Douglass’s speeches and writings.

Morris was particularly pleased to see the show spotlight his great-great-great-grandmother Anna Murray Douglass who, despite being married to the anti-slavery activist for 44 years, was overlooked in his writing and sometimes denigrated by historians.

“It’s so beautiful to see my ancestors come to life on stage,” Morris said after the performance at Arena Stage ended with a standing ovation. “It’s been a longstanding lament in my family that Anna has not received the dignity and respect that she deserves in history. There would be no Frederick Douglass without her.”

The 60-year-old, who sat beside his mother, Nettie Washington Douglass, added: “It’s just really emotional to be able to see my ancestors. Their blood flows through my veins.”

American Prophet is the latest marker of a Douglass renaissance in popular culture. The story of how he escaped slavery as a young man to become a leading thinker, speaker and star – the most photographed man of the 19th century – was told in a Pulitzer prize-winning biography by David Blight in 2018 and his speeches featured in an HBO documentary film earlier this year.

Cornelius Smith Jr as Frederick Douglass in American Prophet. Photograph: Arena Stage

It suggests that former US president Donald Trump got his tenses confused but was not entirely wrong when he observed: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”

Now Douglass has got the Hamilton treatment – sort of. Development of American Prophet began in 2015, the same year that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop influenced musical about the founding fathers made its debut and became a sensation.

Like Hamilton, the show features a president (in this case Abraham Lincoln) bursting into song, a score (by Marcus Hummon) that crosses style barriers and a meditation on legacy and “who tells your story” (Anna, noting that her husband’s name will be remembered by history, asks: “But will mine? Will mine?”)

But whereas Hamilton has received criticism in recent years for underplaying slavery in the national origins story, American Prophet puts the issue front and centre. There are flashbacks to Douglass’s early life in bondage when Anna (Kristolyn Lloyd), a conductor on the underground railroad, encourages him to flee. “My children will not have a slave for a father,” she tells him. “You are not a slave.”

At one point Douglass (Cornelius Smith Jr) recites his celebrated speech: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

And a Douglass call to action is turned into a rousing musical number: “It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” At the climax of the show, he addresses the audience directly and asks them to consider what their contribution to justice will be. “Agitate. Agitate. Agitate!” he urges.

For Morris, who is president of Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, a non-profit organisation that works to combat human trafficking and racism, and who worked as a consultant on the production, such a cry is more pertinent then ever in the Washington of 2022.

He said: “His words still 170 years later resonate, unfortunately. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But we need his voice and we need to be inspired by the great freedom fighters that came before us because we’re living at a time when the country is as divided as it’s been in a long time with the racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric that is out there.

“In the 19th century they ‘othered’ people of African descent to justify taking away their humanity and treating them inhumanely. They would say things like, ‘They’re better off in slavery. Listen to the happy songs that they’re singing. They’re getting the Christian religion.’

“When we think about making a group of people an ‘other’, I think about things like ‘They’re coming to invade our country, they’re rapists or criminals’, justifying mistreating a group of people so that their children can be put in cages. History is not just about the past, but it’s also about the present and it’s about the future as well.”

The sentiments were echoed by Charles Randolph-Wright, the show’s director and co-scriptwriter. After Thursday night’s performance, Randolph-Wright took the stage and said: “It’s so important that we figure out a way to communicate and that’s what we hope for with this piece, that you all, every single one of you, goes out and agitates because that’s what we must do. We have no choice. We do need the fire as Frederick told us 170 years ago.”

He added: “At a time when critical race theory, Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass will not be taught in schools, we have to find the way that it is taught, that they learn about these extraordinary people. And there are so many that did this, so many women who’ve always been ignored in the movement. It’s imperative that we now see and hear them.”

Douglass was born in 1818, escaped from slavery in 1838 and became a prominent abolitionist, conveying to audiences the horror of his first-hand experience and touring Britain and Ireland.

American Prophet is set between 1851 and 1865 with flashbacks to his past. It charts Douglass’s complicated interactions with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, extremist John Brown and President Lincoln, whose assassination on Thursday night prompted one audience member to exclaim, “Oh, shit!”

In a Zoom interview this week, Randolph-Wright, 65, reflected: “Hamilton just blew open the door of what we could do, especially for younger audiences to want to discover history. I hope that we can do that same thing with this storytelling and I hope people are hungry for it. We need to understand where we’ve been to deal with where we are and where we’re going.”

The musical was originally supposed to be staged in the summer of 2020 but was postponed by the coronavirus pandemic. Randolph-Wright added: “My view of this show is radically different now in 2022 than it was in 2020.

Cornelius Smith Jr as Frederick Douglass and the cast of American Prophet. Photograph: Arena Stage

“Being in Washington when all of the things are happening with January 6, with the supreme court – we’re rehearsing and trying to go in and do this work and all this around us is insanity. That’s what was around Frederick and he dealt with it and tried to figure out what was the answer. The answer changes.”

Randolph-Wright, who comes from a long line of civil rights activists, found Douglass’s words both beautiful and prescient. “They are what he wrote about 170 years ago and this we are still dealing with, especially what people of colour deal with every single day in this country, what women deal with, all of it.

“Those words still resonate so strongly. I’ve had friends who’ve come to this show already and they say, ‘You wrote those, right?’ I’m like, ‘No, no, that’s his speech word for word.’”

The words also struck a chord with the opening night audience at Arena Stage. Jamie Stiehm, 61, a columnist and historian who has studied Douglass, said the musical format worked: “It was so passionate, it was so serious, it wasn’t light and whimsical. It didn’t trivialise anything. It ended on that note of ‘we need the fire’ and to ‘agitate’. I thought the actors brought that to life and he himself would have been pleased with the production.”

Photos & Video: See Cornelius Smith Jr. & More in Rehearsals for the World Premiere of AMERICAN PROPHET at Arena Stage

July 27, 2022/0 Comments/in American Prophet, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

July 15, 2022 | Written By Chloe Rabinowitz | Broadway World

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Arena Stage is presenting the world-premiere musical American Prophet. Created by Arena favorite Charles Randolph-Wright (Arena’s Born for This: The BeBe Winans Story, Broadway’s Motown the Musical) and Grammy Award winner Marcus Hummon (“Bless the Broken Road”), American Prophet is powered by Douglass’ own speeches and writings and filled with soaring new melodies. Cornelius Smith Jr. (ABC’s Scandal, All My Children) will star as the fierce abolitionist.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF TONY POWELL | WASHINGTON POST

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Thanks to a new musical, Frederick Douglass dances into pop culture

July 27, 2022/0 Comments/in American Prophet, For Theatre, News /by Divatamer Updates

July 23, 2022 | Written By Peter Marks | Washington Post

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COURTESY OF TONY POWELL; WASHINGTON POST

It begins, aptly enough, with a song about freedom. And Frederick Douglass singing it.

Yes, that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, writer and polymathic political thinker, who escaped enslavement and became one of the most influential — and photographed — Americans of the 19th century. In the guise of actor Cornelius Smith Jr., he sings in the key of activism in the new musical “American Prophet” that is taking its world-premiere bow at Arena Stage in Washington, the city to which Douglass moved in the latter years of his life, and where he died, at 77 in 1895.

Not only sings, but dances, too. That dignified figure staring out of countless black-and-white images now moves to the beat of a score by Nashville-based country music composer Marcus Hummon. “Of course he danced!” declared the musical’s director and co-book writer, Charles Randolph-Wright. “I mean, he met his wife at a dance. He was fascinated by everything; he learned violin late in his life. He had that mind that did not stop, that inquisitive mind.”

The long-gestating show, postponed by the pandemic shutdown, is one of Arena’s efforts at wrapping vital American history in popular culture — a genre that of course owes its momentum to the juggernaut achievements of “Hamilton.” (It marks its official opening in Arena’s Kreeger Theater on July 28.) Other shows springing up of late, such as the Broadway-bound revival of “1776” cast entirely with women, nonbinary and trans actors, attempt to repot the roots of our national story. “American Prophet” freshly seeds the stage for an understanding of how we have sought, at times, to be a more equitable country.

Arena’s enterprise boasts an estimable pedigree. Hummon and Randolph-Wright, the latter the director of the recent Tony-nominated revival of Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” opted to adapt Douglass’s voluminous words for about four-fifths of their script. If that were not enough authenticity, they turned to Kenneth B. Morris Jr., a great-great-great maternal grandson of Douglass, for guidance. That led to Morris being made “Douglass family consultant” to the project.

“We wanted to humanize him, because he’s held up on this pedestal as this iconic figure from history,” Morris said in a Zoom interview. The scale and intensity of Douglass’s fame and advocacy were prodigious, particularly on the issue of ending slavery, but also on education, voting rights and equality for women. “I know, being in the family and also working with scholars that have researched my family,” Morris added, “that the stories about him that humanize him are just fantastic.”

It’s hard to imagine how the story of Douglass’s remarkable life and achievements — the escape from slavery and campaigning for emancipation, his careers as statesman and publisher, his peerless oratory — might be compressed into a couple of hours of exposition and song. Which also seems to have occurred to the creative team. They decided to narrow their focus to events in his biography leading up to the Civil War — a time Randolph-Wright calls Douglass’s “badass period, his activist period, his insurgent period, when he was in his 40s, when he was becoming the American prophet.”

For Hummon, a Grammy-winning songwriter who has composed for the likes of Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd and the Dixie Chicks, it was the realization that Douglass’s own writings could propel the show’s melodies that cemented his creative path. “It ultimately was the poetry of his language that did it, that I started to hear music,” Hummon explained. “If you say, ‘It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,’ I mean, that’s verse. There are times when his oration and his writing simply shift in gear and become poetry.”

COURTESY OF TONY POWELL; WASHINGTON POST

Hummon had embarked on a modest song cycle about Douglass, after reading one of his three autobiographies that was performed at a Nashville church in the mid-2010s. “It was nice and I enjoyed it, but I kept reading and when I got to ‘Life and Times [of Frederick Douglass],’ then I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a huge story here,’ ” Hummon said. “I don’t know. I didn’t fully grasp it. And maybe I still don’t, still trying to, but I knew I needed help. I needed a writer-director to work with. And I had friends who said, ‘Yeah, we know who the guy is.’ ”

That guy was Randolph-Wright, an accomplished director at Arena (Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined”) whose Broadway musical theater projects have included “Motown,” a show built around the achievements of impresario Berry Gordy. As he has also been developing material for a piece about actor Sidney Poitier, Randolph-Wright wasn’t sure another slice of towering-figure drama was in order.

“My immediate response was: ‘uhhh,’ ” he recounted, mimicking exhaustion. But he traveled to Nashville to visit family, sat down to meet Hummon and listened to his music. “And the first song,” the director added, “went through my body.”

A network of interconnecting friendships also resulted in the participation of Morris, who with his mother, Nettie Washington Douglass, founded an organization in 2007, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, that raises awareness of racism and human trafficking. He attended a 2019 reading of the musical at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he met Randolph-Wright. “We became fast friends — we’re brothers now — and then I came on formally as a legacy consultant on the project,” Morris said. A piece of advice he conveyed has become central to the enterprise.

“I had said to Marcus and to Charles early on that my great-great-great-grandmother Anna needs to be portrayed and treated with the dignity and respect that she deserves. And that she has not received in history.”

Embodied by Kristolyn Lloyd — an original cast member on Broadway of “Dear Evan Hansen” — Frederick’s first wife, Anna Douglass, is elevated to a co-starring role. “She was a radical freedom fighter in her own right,” said Morris, whose illustrious ancestry does not end with the Douglasses; he is also the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington. “Anna and Frederick were married for 44 years. They had five children together. They had 21 grandchildren together. And she was a very important part of this.” (Douglass remarried after Anna’s death in 1882.)

A musical that might magnify Douglass’s perch in the popular imagination is for Morris both an emotional mission and a fitting amplification of his legacy. Douglass, he said, well understood the value of stamping a cause with a relatable, humanizing identity — one of the reasons he was such a vigorous early proponent of photography. In fact, a filmmaker suggested to Morris not too long ago that Douglass was “the inventor of the selfie.”

“He was talking about a selfie not as this frivolous thing that people do, but in presenting yourself and placing yourself out there in a way that you want people to see,” Morris said. “So you’re forming your own identity. And while he didn’t take the first picture of himself, he did create that idea of placing yourself out there, into the public consciousness in the way that you want to be seen.”

It is now Randolph-Wright and Hummon who will have a say in how Douglass is seen — and heard. And yes, even how he dances.

American Prophet, music and lyrics by Marcus Hummon, book by Hummon and Charles Randolph-Wright. Directed by Randolph-Wright. Through Aug. 28 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. 202-488-3300. arenastage.org.

Arena Stage

Arena Stage to roar back with mix of bubbly and soul

June 24, 2021/0 Comments/in American Prophet, Charles Randolph-Wright, For Theatre, News, Video Clips /by Divatamer Updates

June 16, 2021 | Written By News Desk | DC Metro Theater Arts

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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