Washington, John David (1984- )

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares15 Views

    ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: Ghosts in the Instrument

    by

    This film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play falters in some specifics, but is still vital viewing.Riddle me this: When is a piano not merely a piano? Answer: In “The Piano Lesson,” where one piano contains a whole world.A whole family’s world, anyhow. The piano in question is an old upright, carved all over with the faces and figures of departed ancestors and stolen from the white Mississippi man who once enslaved members of this family. For Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), that means it’s sacred, a link to past trauma and resilience that must be preserved.For her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), the piano represents something else: money. More precisely, when he looks at the piano he sees the cash he needs to buy a piece of land back home in Mississippi and set up his own farm. That’s why he’s traveled up here to Pittsburgh, where Berniece lives with her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and an uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson). Ostensibly Boy Willie has come to sell watermelons to locals with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). But it’s the piano he’s after.To others, the piano means other things. For Avery (Corey Hawkins), an elevator operator who dreams of starting a church and marrying Berniece, the piano offers the possibility of a stable future. But for Doaker Charles’s brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts), the instrument is a reminder of the exhilarating, unrelenting life he once lived on the road as a successful pianist, before he became washed up and broke.In 1990, “The Piano Lesson” won the eminent playwright August Wilson his second of two Pulitzers for drama. It’s part of his Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called his Century Cycle), a set of 10 decade-spanning plays about Black American life, all set in Pittsburgh. It’s been staged repeatedly since then; the 2022 Broadway revival starred Washington, Jackson and Fisher in the same roles they play in this film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Creator’ Review: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.

      by

      In this hectic, futuristic action film, John David Washington hunts down a threatening artificial intelligence with the baby face of a child.It’s been a tough year for artificial intelligence. First, industry leaders warn that A.I. poses an extinction-level threat to humanity. Then, screenwriters and actors warn roughly the same thing about artists losing their livelihoods (and art losing its soul). And let’s not forget predictions of vast unemployment and upheaval. What’s a superintelligent, terrifyingly autonomous technology got to do to get back on people’s good sides?One answer comes in the whirlwind form of “The Creator,” the latest film directed by Gareth Edwards (“Rogue One,” “Godzilla”). We’ve grown accustomed to A.I. playing the role of helper-turned-villain in movies, and here a rapid newsreel-style prologue sets a familiar stage: Robots were invented, did increasingly complex tasks, and then went nuclear (devastating, in this case, Los Angeles). Now the United States is bent on eliminating their threat, while in East Asian countries (dubbed “New Asia”), bots live at peace with humans. Humanlike robots with Roomba-like heads are police officers, workers, even (somewhat jarringly) saffron-robed monks.One thing stays the same in the future: The movies need a hero. John David Washington plays the reluctant man for the job, Joshua, an ex-undercover soldier who dropped out of sight after a messy raid separated him from his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan). He is recruited for a U.S. military mission, led by Allison Janney as a no-nonsense colonel, to neutralize a top-secret weapon in New Asia. After a macho fly-in that lightly evokes Vietnam War movies (but with a Radiohead soundtrack), he infiltrates an underground lab only to find a mysterious weapon: an A.I. with the human form of a fairly unflappable 6-year-old girl. Joshua decides to take her on the lam, naming her Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).Unlike countless A.I. doomsday scenarios, Alphie is too cute and innocent for Joshua to treat as a military target. He’s drawn to protecting her, though unnerved by her near-telekinetic powers of jamming technology all around her. Her personhood is the sort of conundrum posed with daunting depth in, for example, Spielberg’s millennium masterpiece “A.I.” or more outré films like “Demon Seed.” But here Alphie’s significance functions like a warm-and-fuzzy halo above all the gunfire and explosions: What if A.I. isn’t out to get us? What if it just wants to live and let live?Posing these questions requires doing a little heavy lifting on behalf of the film, which is busy spurring on the hectic pursuit of Alphie and Joshua (by, among others, Ken Watanabe as a dogged A.I. “simulant”). Edwards (who wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz) fluently integrates images and ideas from our established cinematic vocabulary for thinking about A.I. But despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.Still, tech eye candy can go a long way in science fiction. Humanlike robots like Alphie have elegant circular portals where their ears would be. Nomad, the massive spaceship that the United States uses to hunt down artificial intelligence, scans Earth with blue light, like a colossal photocopier. But Washington feels curiously disconnected from the visual set pieces that Edwards builds out, and his character’s increasingly fraught back story with Maya feels scattered across flashbacks. Above all, the film’s tone is uneven: Edwards pushes the relatable ordinariness of the androids and hybrid “simulants,” but the potential menace of A.I. inescapably looms.The film’s matter-of-fact acceptance of A.I. as an innocuous (or indifferent) force in the world is reminiscent of Edwards’s 2014 take on “Godzilla.” The monsters in that movie weren’t bad per se; they were just creatures independent of humans. This is more or less the case made for A.I. in “The Creator”: autonomy without tears (or bloodshed). It’s a provocative idea — all A.I. wants from humans is a little love — but that utopia doesn’t compute.The CreatorRated PG-13 for violent havoc. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

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

      by

      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

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Malcolm & Marie’ Review: Fight Flub

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Malcolm & Marie’ Review: Fight FlubA gorgeous Hollywood couple has an extended, exhausting argument in this claustrophobic example of pandemic filmmaking from Netflix.John David Washington and Zendaya in “Malcolm & Marie.”Credit…Dominic Miller/NetflixFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMalcolm & MarieDirected by Sam LevinsonDrama, RomanceR1h 46mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.A movie of dueling monologues and competing grievances, Sam Levinson’s “Malcolm & Marie” traps us inside the luxury rental and dysfunctional relationship of two enormously privileged, fiercely self-involved people.The mood is so depressingly combative that the elation and grace of the opening scene feels like an unfulfilled promise. As the golden beats of James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City” flood the soundtrack, Malcolm (John David Washington), a rising-star filmmaker, dances exuberantly across his living-room. He and his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya), have just returned from a successful premiere, and he’s high on acclaim and his own virtuosity.His peacocking, however, irritates Marie, who heads for the bathroom in a sulk. A former drug addict whose grueling experiences inspired Malcolm’s film, Marie is about to unload a wealth of resentment on her unsuspecting partner. First, though, she’ll have to listen to him, his joy evaporated, complain about critics who define him by his Blackness — a justifiable loathing of categorization that doesn’t prevent him, later in the film, from singling out one female Los Angeles Times critic for special scorn.That rant, an almost 10-minute scream-and-stomp tirade against, in part, the inadequacies of film criticism, isn’t the movie’s lowest point, only its most exhausting. (In Levinson’s script, the couple’s relationship woes are constantly competing with industry-related whining.) Malcolm may or may not be a megaphone for his director’s personal gripes, but Washington, a charismatically intense and supple performer, is ill-served by speeches that have the cadence and calculation of acting-school exercises.Zendaya, for her part, fares slightly better with a character who is more willing to be vulnerable. When Malcolm cruelly tells Marie she’s not special, listing all the damaged women he has known who could have served as inspiration, she is touchingly wounded. Yet she also senses the insecurities behind his swaggering egotism, smartly pointing out — given his educated, upper-middle-class background — the artifice of his underdog posturing.Fighting the metronomic beats of the movie’s equal-time speeches, Zendaya (who has the advantage of working with the crew and creator of her HBO show, “Euphoria”) allows us to glimpse the suffering that brought Marie to this point, and to this man. And while Marcell Rev’s high-contrast, black-and-white photography is often quite lovely — in one surreal shot, trees outside the home rear up like twisted, fairy-tale villains — only occasionally do his camera movements ease the claustrophobia of the stage-like setting.A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, “Malcolm & Marie,” is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow. What obligation, if any, does an artist have to their muse? And how do we separate an artist’s work from their ethnicity?“I promise you, nothing productive is going to be said tonight,” Marie says near the beginning of the movie. Sadly, she’s telling the truth.Malcolm & MarieRated R for foul language, crude foreplay and toxic egotism. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tenet’ | Anatomy of a Scene

      by

      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More