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    As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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    As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More

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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      Broadway Bounces Back With ‘Best Week Since the Before Times’

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      Broadway shows grossed $51.9 million during the holiday week, the most since 2019, and “The Lion King” set a record for the most earned by any show in a single week.Broadway, still struggling to rebound from the lengthy pandemic shutdown, is starting the new year with a sign of hope: Last week was, by far, the best for the industry since the arrival of the coronavirus.The 33 shows running grossed $51.9 million, which is the most since the final week of 2019. And “The Lion King,” which last fall celebrated its 25th anniversary on Broadway, notched a remarkable milestone: It grossed $4.3 million, which is the most ever taken in by a show in a single week on Broadway.The boffo numbers — 21 shows grossed more than $1 million last week — come with caveats. Both Christmas and New Year’s days fell on Sundays, concentrating holiday travelers into a single week. Twenty shows added extra performances for the holiday week, giving nine instead of the usual eight. And ticket prices were high: The average Broadway seat went for $166, up from $128 just four weeks earlier.But the strong week sent a signal that under the right circumstances, Broadway can deliver. During the holiday week — the week that ended Jan. 1 — the 22 musicals and 11 plays running were, on average, 92 percent full. Overall attendance was 312,878, which is not a record (in fact, it was the 27th-best-attended week in history, according to the Broadway League), but is good (by comparison, attendance over Thanksgiving week was 259,298).The two final weeks of the year saw combined grosses of $86.7 million, which is up 115 percent over the previous year, but down 12 percent compared to those key holiday weeks in 2019.“What you see is that we’re continuing to build and maintain our audience,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and theater owners. “We’re not back to where we were, but we’re doing very well at a time of uncertainty.”According to the League, last week was the third-highest-grossing in history. The highest was the week ending Dec. 30, 2018, when grosses were $57.8 million and attendance was 378,910; the second-highest was the week ending Dec. 29, 2019, when grosses were $55.8 million and attendance was 350,714.“The Lion King,” with a nine-performance week, toppled the previous record for the top-grossing week by a single show, which had been held by “Hamilton,” which grossed $4 million for eight performances during the week that ended Dec. 30, 2018. (The figures are not adjusted for inflation.)“The Lion King” earned $4.3 million last week, the most a single show has ever earned in one week. It resumed performances in September 2021.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesThe holidays are traditionally strong for Broadway, but in 2021 the final weeks of the year were a bloodbath because the Omicron variant led to cancellations of multiple shows. Now, despite the “tripledemic” of circulating respiratory illnesses, Broadway has largely figured out how to keep going: During the last three weeks, 12 scheduled performances were canceled, compared to 221 cancellations during the final three weeks of 2021.Throughout the industry, shows were trumpeting breaking records last week.“Chicago” had the highest-grossing week in its 26-year history, as well as its highest single-performance gross. The once-struggling “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which revived its fortunes after the shutdown by consolidating from two parts into one, was already the highest-grossing play in Broadway history, and last week set a record (nearly $2.7 million) for weekly gross by a play. And a starry revival of “The Piano Lesson” was on track to being the highest grossing play by August Wilson — the much-celebrated and oft-performed bard of 20th-century African American life — in Broadway history.Several shows set house records at the theaters where they are being performed, including the revival of “Funny Girl,” which had been floundering financially until its producers brought in Lea Michele to star. Also setting records were shows including “Beetlejuice,” which closes Jan. 8 after a bumpy ride; “Six,” the pop-concert-style reconsideration of the wives of Henry VIII; “& Juliet,” a new musical imagining an alternative history for Shakespeare’s famously star-crossed lover, and “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical.“We had our best week since the before times,” said Victoria Bailey, the executive director of TDF, a nonprofit organization that runs the TKTS discount ticket booths, who said her staff is noticing increasing geographic diversity among ticket buyers.“We were seeing people from lots and lots of states and lots and lots of countries — it wasn’t the same folks making the numbers bigger, but it was folks from further away,” Bailey said. “I don’t have any reason to say we’re out of the woods, but I don’t think this was just a one-off. And if we get to a point where you periodically have good weeks, that will be helpful.”Bailey and St. Martin both noted that tourists from China have not yet returned in significant numbers as that nation battles surging coronavirus cases. But both said they were particularly heartened by returning domestic tourism.Broadway now enters a period of greater challenge: January and February have historically been weak months for the industry. There are 12 shows scheduled to close this month, which is at the high end of the normal range for January closings. But there are a raft of openings planned in March and April — it looks like the overall number of new shows this season will be within the typical range — and St. Martin said she is feeling good about the industry’s trajectory.“I am overwhelmingly optimistic about the spring,” she said. More

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      11 Ways I Escaped Reality This Year

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      Our critic was haunted, in a good way, by the performances she saw in movies, theater and TV that offered glimpses into other worlds.In a year when so much, including our democracy, felt topsy-turvy, I was drawn to entertainment that took me out of our real world to another realm. Be it the supernatural, the surreal, the spirit world, or just a superb performance: Here’s my list of 11 otherworldly movies, TV series, actors and plays that brought me joy and centeredness amid the chaos.‘Macbeth’In Sam Gold’s take on “Macbeth,” I loved the lustful love story between Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, but is it weird to say that I also really dug the stew? When we entered the theater, the three witches, dressed in sweaters and jeans, were already onstage stirring their pot, and later they utter the lines that seal Macbeth’s fate. But at the end of the play, when everyone in the cast sits together and shares a bowl, this update, along with one of the witches (Bobbi MacKenzie) singing Gaelynn Lea’s ballad “Perfect,” enacted healing. It reminded me that despite the setbacks that befell the cast and our country, being alive and in the community of theater was something to celebrate. (Read our review of “Macbeth.”)‘The Woman King’With “The Old Guard,” the filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood proved she had the chops for a feminist superhero flick. But with the Viola Davis-led “Woman King,” she went epic in scale and story. She wove in the history of the Agojie, the all-female army in the West African kingdom of Dahomey; produced brilliant fight scenes with actors who performed their own stunts; and explored war, sexual assault and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, prophecy is protection, and though it is never named as such, the Dahomey religious practice of Vodun is a guide for Davis’s character, General Nanisca, as she prepares to take on enemies, foreign and domestic, and confront her own demons. (Read our review of “The Woman King.”)Viola Davis, center, stars in “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures‘P-Valley’Set at a strip club in Mississippi, the Starz series “P-Valley” is a “love letter to all women who are scrapping it out, but particularly for the Black women that I think a lot of people thumb their noses at, even Black folks,” according to its creator, Katori Hall. It is a sentiment channeled through the veteran dancer and aspiring gym owner Mercedes (Brandee Evans) and the up-and-coming Keyshawn (Shannon Thornton), who is trapped in her career and abusive marriage. But it is Hoodoo, the spiritual practice introduced to them by the club’s security guard Diamond (Tyler Lepley), that might save them. Based on the Season 2 cliffhanger, I’m hoping Diamond’s efforts worked or that he will be there to ward off evil spirits and people in the future. (Streaming on Starz.)‘Reservation Dogs’A coming-of-age tale told through four Indigenous teenagers — Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack — in the fictional town of Okern, Okla., “Reservation Dogs” masterfully pokes fun at Hollywood stereotypes and acknowledges the nuances of Native culture. While William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth) is a bumbling spirit guide who gives Bear unsound advice, he is also the counterpoint to ancestral “spirits” such as Elora’s grandmother or Daniel, a friend of the four teens whose suicide prompts them to leave their reservation (or at least attempt to). In the wonderfully rich ninth episode, Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) seeks advice from her aunt and Daniel’s mother, Hokti, who is incarcerated. After Willie Jack makes an offering of Cheez-Its, Flaming Flamers chips and a Skux energy drink, Hokti (Lily Gladstone) reveals that the many spirits surrounding Willie Jack will help her in time. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Piano Lesson’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’Ghosts came in different forms this Broadway season. In her revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” LaTanya Richardson Jackson decided to literalize the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter. Though we never see him, his haunting of the Charles family becomes all too real, making the family’s battles over a piano a deeper allegory of race, property and American history. Equally compelling is Miranda Cromwell’s revival of “Death of a Salesman,” whose all-Black family includes Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife, Linda. Willy’s older brother, Ben (André De Shields), is not just a ghost but a griot, too. Sporting a white cane, a white suit and bedazzled shoes, Ben plagues Willy with his success while his spirit beckons his younger brother to the other side. This infuses the play with a new sense of ambiguity, never justifying Willy’s final decision but adding a layer of empathy and compassion. (Read our reviews of “The Piano Lesson” and “Death of a Salesman.”)Wendell Pierce, left, as Willy Loman and Andre De Shields as Ben Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegina HallRegina Hall showed her versatility this year with two wildly different performances. In Mariama Diallo’s horror movie “Master,” she plays Gail Bishop, who, as the first Black dean of a residence hall at the elite Ancaster College, must constantly contend with racism and its impact on her and on Black students. In Adamma Ebo’s comedy “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” she is Trinitie Childs, the wife of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor (Sterling K. Brown) and a woman obsessed with climbing back to her former state of church glory. The way she evokes Trinitie’s pity, pettiness, petulance and pride gives this film its most memorable and haunting moments. (Read our reviews of “Master” and “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”)‘Nope’The cinephile in me was pleasantly surprised that Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was a movie about movies. Peele not only pays homage to early film and photography technologies, and the suspense and terror brought on by Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Jaws,” but he also does so while remembering those African Americans whose early contributions to the motion picture industry have been forgotten or ignored. Thanks to Peele’s clever writing, creative directing and smart casting of his frequent collaborator Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) as well as the magnanimous Keke Palmer, this movie about gentrification, U.F.O.s and racial discrimination ended up being just an old-fashioned, feel-good movie, the kind we still desperately need. (Read our review of “Nope.”)‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’It was a bold move to follow up on a sci-fi classic starring David Bowie as an extraterrestrial. Rather than compete with such memorable casting, Showtime’s 10-episode series “The Man Who Fell to Earth” humanized its protagonist, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), by doubling his outsiderness: He arrives in the United States as both an alien and a Black man. In an electrifying sixth episode on jazz music, Faraday and other characters discover a sound of their shared humanity and a possible key to salvaging both of their planets. (Streaming on Showtime.)Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in the TV series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”Showtime‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I can’t stop raving about this movie — the costumes, the makeup, the editing (oh, the editing!). The fight scenes, the I.R.S. scenes. The marvelous Michelle Yeoh, playing the laundromat owner and cosmic warrior Evelyn Wang, and Stephanie Hsu, playing her disenchanted daughter, Joy. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work under the name Daniels, have said that this is mostly a film about the confusion that arises when its characters believe they are in different movie genres from one another. I also admire how this genre diversity (thriller, sci-fi, martial arts, domestic drama) perfectly captured expansive cultural identities (immigrant narratives, Asian American families, queer children) and the depth of our earliest love story (between mother and daughter) — all of which still seem to be unmined in Hollywood. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)Brian Tyree HenryThe surreal TV series “Atlanta” started off focused on the Princeton dropout (Donald Glover) who became his rapper cousin’s manager, but in its final season it was mainly about the rapper, Alfred a.k.a. Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and his journey to define himself beyond the trappings of fame, wealth or the music industry. His textured performance gave Alfred more emotional depth as his character confronted feral hogs, white privilege in hip-hop and his own mortality. Henry’s onscreen brilliance led Lila Neugebauer to rewrite and reshoot key scenes in her debut film, “Causeway,” now on Apple+, devoting more time to the friendship between his character and Jennifer Lawrence’s. The result is a moving portrait of grief and hope, in which Henry lights up the film. (Read our review of “Causeway.”) More

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      John David Washington Gets an Education in ‘The Piano Lesson’

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      The actor adds to his body of knowledge with a starry production of the August Wilson play and a once-in-a-lifetime moment with Robert De Niro on “Amsterdam.”You cannot show up more prepared than John David Washington, cannot outmaneuver him and cannot get ahead of him. If you think you have arrived on time for your lunch appointment with him, you will find he has already been waiting for you — he has, in fact, been sitting quietly at a table at Bubby’s for 15 minutes, in his perennially prompt, unapologetically eager manner. And now he is not just ready to eat; he is practically vibrating in his chair so he can tear through a bowl of matzo ball soup and get back to the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where he has been performing in “The Piano Lesson.”Washington is by no means a novice actor. At 38, he has already starred in films like Spike Lee’s true-crime drama “BlacKkKlansman” and Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending, time-twisting adventure “Tenet.”But he is a newcomer to the Broadway stage, and in “The Piano Lesson,” he is making his debut with a demanding and poignant August Wilson play, in a high-profile production featuring the husband-and-wife team of Samuel L. Jackson (who co-stars in it) and LaTanya Richardson Jackson (who directed it).Despite his lack of theater experience, Washington has drawn raves for his performance. In her review, the New York Times critic Maya Phillips wrote, “Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in.”To navigate a text and a discipline that are unfamiliar to him, Washington is approaching the task like a humble rookie, ready to receive the education that it might provide — along with any bumps or bruises that might come with it.Asked why he wanted to perform in “The Piano Lesson,” Washington said: “I did it for selfish reasons. This was like going back to school. This is a master class. I want to learn. I want to get beat up.”He added, “If I can survive, I’m going to be such a better actor than I was before I started this.”Washington with Samuel L. Jackson onstage. Jackson, a longtime family friend, said that when the young man decided to act, “we all told him, ‘You can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen.’”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn a Tuesday in October before the play had opened, Washington was bracing himself for the rehearsal later that afternoon. “We’re going in for notes and preparing to get slaughtered,” he said.If his language is full of vivid, brutal metaphors, it might be because Washington is a former football player — a relentless running back for the Morehouse College Maroon Tigers and later for the St. Louis Rams, as well as teams in the now-defunct N.F.L. Europe and U.F.L.He is also, of course, a son of Denzel Washington, the decorated actor and filmmaker. John David, who lives in New York, has spent a lifetime observing his father’s performances, whether as a child seeing him in “Richard III” at Shakespeare in the Park or as a grown man watching him in the Broadway production of “Fences,” the Wilson play that his father later starred in and directed for the screen.When Denzel Washington learned that John David was getting ready for the eight-shows-a-week rigor of Broadway, he heartily encouraged the proposition. “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David,’” the younger Washington recalled.But when John David decided that he wanted to pursue acting, after a torn Achilles’ tendon halted his sports career, it was impressed upon him that he’d achieve success only through hard work and not by trading on his last name.Jackson, a longtime friend of the Washington family, said that he was one of several people who talked to the young man about the challenging path that awaited him. “We all told him, you can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen,” Jackson recalled. “You’ve got to go to class, you’ve got to put in the work. Being the dedicated athlete that he was, he attacked it in the same way that he attacked that, and he got all he could out of it.”Washington made his breakthrough on the HBO comedy series “Ballers” (2015-19), playing a hotheaded N.F.L. star. Another crucial opportunity came when Lee chose him to star as the police detective Ron Stallworth in “BlacKkKlansman,” released in 2018.As Washington saw it, Lee took a significant chance in elevating him from supporting roles to a lead player: “Spike was like, ‘You’re not a running back — you’re a quarterback. You need to call the offense and run the plays,’” Washington said.In 2020, he starred in “Tenet,” a complex thriller about characters who can move forward and backward in time. Despite Nolan’s pedigree, the film’s opening was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic and it was ultimately released at a time when audiences were hardly ready to return to theaters en masse.Washington’s father gave him advice about acting: “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David.’” Tess Ayano for The New York TimesTwo years later, Washington has tried to remain sanguine about his “Tenet” experience. “I believe in God — I’m a heavy believer, so it was the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “But it really hurt that we couldn’t give it its proper rollout and world tour.”Even so, Washington said he was grateful for the trust Nolan had placed in him and for the chance to help execute Nolan’s intricate vision. “As taxing as it was, it damn near broke me, but I’d do it again and again,” Washington said.He was given another prominent big-screen position this fall when he starred alongside Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam,” the antic period caper from the filmmaker David O. Russell.Bale found Washington soft-spoken and studious during rehearsals, but said his co-star suddenly came alive when they filmed a sequence in which their characters fled a murder scene.“I kept laughing because he was clearly enjoying showing me that no matter how fast I ran, he could always run faster,” Bale said. “I kept zigging and zagging, running circles up and down the street, and he wouldn’t ever let me get in front of him.”Bale added, “He’s quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”“Amsterdam” was a critical and commercial flop, none of which mattered to Washington, who came away with one of his most treasured memories as an actor.“There was a take I did that was very emotional,” he said, “and afterwards, Robert De Niro came over and hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and he said, ‘Good job, son.’ I will never forget that. I can die now.”“The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes, is part of the playwright’s Pittsburgh Cycle. There, in 1936, the domestic life of Berniece (Danielle Brooks) and her uncle Doaker (Jackson) is interrupted by the return of Berniece’s talkative and charismatic brother, Boy Willie (Washington), who has recently left prison.While Berniece treasures the family’s piano, which carries a tragic history and is decorated with carvings of relatives who had been enslaved, Boy Willie has other plans for it, believing he can buy his way to legitimacy with the money earned from selling it.Washington said that to him the play conveyed “the overwhelming feeling of American society’s proprietary entitlement over its history.” With a chuckle, he added that it told a relatable story about “every family gathering, how there’s always that one cousin or family who shows up and it’s like, oh, here we go.”Washington said that he started learning his lines for “The Piano Lesson” when he was in Indonesia earlier this year, filming “True Love,” a science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla,” “Rogue One”).In rehearsals this fall, Washington said that LaTanya Richardson Jackson advocated the utmost fidelity to Wilson’s text. “She always talks about how we’re here to amplify his words,” Washington said. “Don’t put too much sauce on there. Let the words charge all of your decision.”With Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam.” Bale said Washington is “quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”20th Century StudiosHe has endured a certain amount of affectionate hazing from his more seasoned co-stars. Washington recounted the time when Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts called him out for eating banana chips in rehearsal: “Sam was like,” — he uttered a Jackson-esque word that cannot be printed here — “Boy Willie don’t eat no banana chips. That’s the young generation. He eats pork rinds.”Washington said he had the quickness to retort, “No, see, Boy Willie’s ahead of his time.”The play holds a special value for Jackson, who played Boy Willie in its original 1987 production at Yale Repertory Theater. He said, however, that he did not feel particularly territorial about seeing the role passed onto Washington.“You can’t possess things that way,” he said. “And LaTanya told me not to talk to him about Boy Willie anyway — she didn’t want me putting my ideas in his head.”In their work on the play, Jackson said he had already seen Washington grow as an actor. “John David’s really quite introverted,” he explained. “The only time he puts himself out there is when he has an opportunity to inhabit another character and be someone that’s not him.”What “The Piano Lesson” has given Washington, Jackson said, is a confidence that he can take into future film or TV projects — the self-assurance of knowing “when you’re on a soundstage or on a set, and nobody’s laughing or applauding for you, how you feel about what you just did. You don’t have to go to the monitor to prove to yourself that you did it. You’ll know, OK, that felt right.”These are big-picture, existential questions that Washington may contemplate after “The Piano Lesson” ends. For now, he is content to grapple with the day-to-day demands of putting on the play and the pleasures of losing himself in a character who feels diametrically opposed to who he really is.As he recalled, “There’s a line where Sam says to me, ‘Will you just be quiet?’ There was a night I almost cracked up the way he said it, because I felt like he really meant it.”Washington seemed genuinely delighted by the notion that he could be so talkative it would annoy someone else. “I must have really been rolling that night,” he said. “I don’t do that in my real life.” More

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      ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

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      John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      LaTanya Richardson Jackson on Directing ‘The Piano Lesson’ (and Her Husband)

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      As she makes her Broadway directorial debut, she said her “vision is about seeing a deeper way into” what August Wilson intended with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.LaTanya Richardson Jackson believes in ghosts. Better put: She believed her parents, and grandparents, when they talked about being frequently visited by people who were invisible to the human eye. Such a childhood has not only opened her up to having similar experiences but also made her uniquely qualified to bring one of August Wilson’s most haunting plays, “The Piano Lesson,” back to Broadway this fall.It first premiered there in 1990, and this Broadway revival — the show’s first — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington. The play, initially produced in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theater, is the fourth in Wilson’s 10-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” which explores a full century of African American life in Pennsylvania’s Steel City.Jackson saw that original production, in part, because she was an actress and lifelong admirer of Wilson’s work. (She later starred in a Tony-nominated revival of Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 2009 and made her directorial debut with his “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta in 2013.) But she was also there to support her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who was playing the lead character, Boy Willie. He’s also starring in the revival, but as Boy Willie’s uncle Doaker.From left: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and Ray Fisher in “The Piano Lesson” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 13.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in 1936, “The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990, follows two siblings, Boy Willie (Washington) and Berniece (Brooks), as they debate the fate of their family heirloom, a piano upon which the faces of their great-grandmother and her son are carved. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and buy the property their enslaved ancestors worked on in the South. Berniece wants to keep it, understanding that the piano itself offers them another connection and liberation from their oppressive past. In contrast, Doaker sees the piano as haunted both by Boy Charles, his dead older brother and Boy Willie and Berniece’s father; and the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter.On Broadway, Jackson, 72, is best known for portraying Lena Younger in a 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and, more recently, as Calpurnia, in the substantially expanded role of Atticus Finch’s sagacious and reserved housekeeper in Aaron Sorkin’s 2019 adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But, within African American drama, in regional theaters and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” Jackson has long been a familiar face.“The star thing,” she told me. “You have to have a mind-set for that. And I just was never willing to do that.”What she has been doing is giving life to complex Black female protagonists on the stage and screen, and now working to unlock the deeper elements of Wilson’s women. Wilson once said he wanted to create a female character in “The Piano Lesson,” which “was as large as Troy was in Fences.” But, in the end, Wilson had to admit that his interests in the themes of self-worth, tradition, and tracing the history of the piano for 135 years took over the plot so much that his female character was “not as large as I intended.”Knowing that, Richardson said she paid homage to Wilson the best way she knew how: by making visible the many worlds, obvious and hidden, his play offers us. She added that her early encounters with the play, as well as Wilson and his other works, empowered her to take those risks here in her Broadway directorial debut.In a recent video interview, Jackson talked about navigating the gender politics of Wilson’s plays, what working with Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington has been like and how she discovered that directing was really her first love. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’re the first woman to direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. How has your perspective as a Black woman impacted your approach to his material?August was such a man’s man. When I directed “Two Trains Running” for Kenny Leon’s True Colors company in Atlanta, I told him [Leon], “As a woman, I look at things differently, and what might appear to you as minutiae, I find to be an important point.”I remember telling Pauletta [Washington], who played Risa, “Every time one of those men mention a woman who has died or was killed, you drop something in the kitchen and make a big, loud noise so that they have to stop and think about what they just said.” We can’t just have a conversation about women being cut or stabbed to death like that’s just a regular part of life. Our presence should not be something that’s taken for granted. Our presence is important.In “The Piano Lesson,” Berniece, like Risa, is the only woman in the cast.Yes, Berniece is surrounded by all of this testosterone. I saw the first production of this play at Yale, and I remember asking August after, “Where are all the women? Where are all the parts for women?” And he said, “Well, you know, Joe Turner has women.” I said, “But we’re always singular.” Then, he told me, “I’ll write about them when I really know what I’m saying.”My mentor, Douglas Turner Ward, told me: “Great playwrights don’t always know what they’re writing or what they have written. They attempt to do something, and if it’s great, the spirits visit them, and they just write. It’s a director’s job to see what they have actually written, whether or not it was their intention or not. Usually, with great writers, it’s bigger than what they intend.” And I find that to be so true of August.You embrace the otherworldliness of this story. Why was that important to you?Oct. 2 was the anniversary of August’s transition, so I’ve been thinking about him and his widow, Constanza Romero, and how to approach this story spiritually. I’m telling everybody, “This is a ghost story.” I believe there are other worlds where things are occurring, even if we don’t see them. To manifest that in the play, I felt that every member in that house was fighting their own ghosts. But Sutter [the white slave owner] represents the ghost of racism and the cruel manner we have had to navigate life in this country. August metaphorically shows that this ghost was an albatross around our necks. But I wanted to visually manifest it so that there was no question that we were attempting to exorcise it.Like any good ghost story, the house also seems haunted.I told myself that I had to find a designer who could build a house that was not raggedy but was really broken. August was a genius. In this play, he gave us these two-sided Janus figures. Not just between Boy Willie and Berniece, but [the brothers] Wining Boy and Doaker Charles, and the family and Lymon [Boy Willie’s friend]. And he did so because he believed that our people deserve to be recorded and documented in a classical way. That’s why we call him our Shakespeare.So, when I told our gifted set designer, Beowulf [Boritt], that house had to be split open, he was intrigued. Then when I said, “And the house has no walls.” He said, “I’m going down that rabbit hole with you.” Listen, we don’t change August’s words. That’s sacrosanct. That’s not what this vision is about. This vision is about seeing a deeper way into what he has given us.Mostly known for her work as an actress, Jackson says directing is her true passion: “I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe piano is so meaningful to this family, and its symbolism is heightened by its physical beauty. Is there a story behind its design?Other versions of the play always have these pianos with these beautifully carved fresco plaques on them. But, Sam and I — you know I am married to Sam Jackson, right? — well, back in our house in Los Angeles, we have a Tree of Life statue made by the Makonde sculptors from East Africa. They start with a piece of ebony and then pass it among the community members to carve until it is all done. So, I wanted the piano to look like a Makonde statue and Mama’s face had to be the most prominent, and then the little boy Charles. And you know how they made that happen? A 3-D printer.Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson, he starred as Boy Willie in the original production. Now, he is playing the role of one of the uncles, Doaker Charles. What was it like for you to direct him?Sam and I are used to working together and being around each other 24/7. But I realized in this particular context, he doesn’t like to take a note. I had heard that about him before, but I just thought, “Oh, he just doesn’t like to take notes from people he feels don’t know what they’re talking about.” I didn’t think I’d even have to tell him, “That’s the note, brother.” And when I did, he said, “Well, I think I would know how that goes.” And I said, “I’m just bringing it to your attention that it didn’t go the way I would like it to go.”The way that I operate is that there are no stars in the room. We are an ensemble, and we are moving together or not at all. But, it was a true gift that this project came to me with Sam and John David already attached to it.This is John David Washington’s first play. You’ve also known him for a long time, did anything surprise you about his performance?Denzel and Pauletta Washington have been very generous with their children with me, and I love all their children. They, like our daughter, Zoe, are all worker bees. So to watch John David’s career and be able to help develop it is beyond a responsibility. It’s like being given something from God that says, “OK, you take care of and nurture this.” And to him, I said, “We got this. Just trust me. Your instrument is built soundly. We are going to give you the notes, and all you have to do is play them.” And he has exceeded my wildest imagination.This brings us back to Berniece. There are the words on the page, and then what you bring to her character.Or what Danielle [Brooks] brings. I’ve only been trying to guide Danielle toward who I think Berniece is. I’ve seen different renditions of this character, and she is always so angry, almost too angry. And I know she’s frustrated because she lost Crawford, the love of her life, and blames Boy Willie. But there are times that the anger covers up that hurt. So, I’ve told her, “Sometimes I just want to see the hurt because it allows me into you in a different way.” This is a family that loves each other, so she has to have a heart for him, too.Do you want to continue directing?Since I was in sixth grade, I knew that this was something inside of me, and God only knows who or what I could have been or done by now if I had just followed that track. I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now. More

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      Black Film and TV Actors Get a Chance to Shine on Broadway

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      On Broadway this fall, it’s less about new playwrights making their debuts and more about established stars giving the stage a shot.One of the most exciting parts of the 2021-22 Broadway season was the number of people who looked like me, both onstage and behind the scenes. We saw the Broadway debut of seven plays by Black playwrights, starring Black actors, in an art form that too often tokenizes people of color, alienates them, misrepresents them or ignores them altogether.But even when productions are bathed in the bright lights of Broadway, they can still be overlooked: Many of last fall’s works seemed to disappear as quickly as they appeared in the tough post-shutdown return period. This fall, Broadway may not have as many new works by Black playwrights, but it will serve old favorites with promising casts of versatile Black actors who have built careers not just on the stage, but also in film and TV.One of last season’s highlights was the playwright Alice Childress receiving her long-overdue Broadway debut with the stunning comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.” So, what better time to give even more neglected writers of color their moment in the spotlight? The experimental Black playwright Adrienne Kennedy will follow this November with a similarly belated premiere, a production of her harrowing 1992 play “Ohio State Murders,” starring the stage luminary Audra McDonald as a writer who returns to her alma mater to speak about the violent imagery in her work.A lethal mix of present-day racial injustice and unrelenting racial trauma from the past, “Ohio State Murders,” directed by Kenny Leon, will have an exciting peer in a revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play “The Piano Lesson,” directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (a cast member of the 2009 Broadway revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” to cite another Wilson work). Her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who originated the role of Boy Willie in “The Piano Lesson” at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, will also join this revival, now in the role of Doaker Charles, Boy Willie’s uncle who recounts the titular piano’s history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows siblings who are at odds over whether to sell a piano bearing depictions of their enslaved ancestors.The appeal of these plays doesn’t just come down to the material and the ethnicity of the casts, however; the Black casts this season represent captivating newcomers and veterans from various realms of theater, film and TV. So those only familiar with Jackson’s explosive acting style in, say, an action-packed Marvel movie or a brutal Quentin Tarantino film, will now see how the actor’s energy translates to the stage. The same will be true for Jackson’s castmate Danielle Brooks, a star of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” who made an acclaimed Broadway debut in “The Color Purple” in 2015 and tickled audiences as the brassy Beatrice in the Public Theater’s 2019 production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”Film and TV are, after all, a different ballgame than the theater, where actors must respond in real time to the action onstage and perform with a resonance that will reach the upper echelons of the balcony. That will be the challenge for John David Washington (“Tenet,” “BlacKkKlansman”), who is new to the theater and will be making his Broadway debut in “The Piano Lesson.”Elsewhere on Broadway this season, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will transition from his arresting roles on TV (“Watchmen”) and film (Jordan Peele’s “Candyman” reimagining) in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning work that follows the daily rituals of two impoverished brothers named Lincoln and Booth. He will make his Broadway debut opposite Corey Hawkins, who played the charming cab dispatcher Benny in John Cho’s film adaptation of “In the Heights.” Hawkins also played Dr. Dre in “Straight Outta Compton” and Macduff in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” and was nominated for a Tony Award for his role as the con man Paul Poitier in the 2017 Broadway revival of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation.”Most of these plays are contemporary, dating only from the last three decades or so. (The neglect or erasure of early works by Black artists and other artists of color is, unfortunately, common.) But a West End and Young Vic revival of “Death of a Salesman” reconfigures Arthur Miller’s beloved 1949 classic into a story about a Black family, starring Wendell Pierce, André De Shields and Sharon D Clarke, who won an Olivier Award for best actress for her portrayal of Linda Loman in the British production and is known stateside for her knockout performance in last season’s “Caroline, or Change.”So anticipation is running high this season not just for the polished onstage products — the glamorous and funny, tense and heart-rending Black productions — but also for the array of Black talent, from the Broadway of decades past to today’s Hollywood stars, that will meet, creating something utterly of the moment. More

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      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

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      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More