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Home , Daveed Diggs, Marc Platt (producer), Negro Ensemble Company, Ntozake Shange, Seth Stewart

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Wednesday, January 18, 2017

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Lana Picciano, Angela Yamarone

PAGES: 18, including this page

January 18, 2017 ‘Hamilton’ Casts Its Next Lafayette and Jefferson By Joshua Barone

“Hamilton” fans, meet the latest quick-tongued actor to take on the dual role of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson.

James Monroe Iglehart, who won a Tony Award for his performance as the Genie in “Aladdin,” will join the cast of “Hamilton” in mid-April, Jeffrey Seller, the show’s lead producer, announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Iglehart was involved in “Hamilton” in its early stages, having sung the role of Hercules Mulligan at a Lincoln Center concert staging of “The Hamilton Mixtape” in 2012. He also performed (under the name J-Soul) in the hip-hop improv troupe Freestyle Love Supreme with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and original star of “Hamilton,” and Christopher Jackson. (Mr. Jackson portrayed George Washington in the musical.)

“It was fun to watch my friends put this show together,” Mr. Iglehart said. “I’ve been listening to this for a while.”

Because Mr. Iglehart has spent the last three years in “Aladdin” on Broadway and in its tryout in Seattle, he said, it seemed as if the opportunity had passed for returning to “Hamilton.”

As Lafayette/Jefferson, he will step into a role that is full of showy crowd-pleasing runs of extremely fast rap. Daveed Diggs originated the part and “made it what it is,” Mr. Iglehart said. (Mr. Diggs, who won a Tony for his performance, left the cast in July. Since then, Seth Stewart has played the role.)

But Mr. Iglehart said he wouldn’t be daunted by tongue-twisting lyrics at high speed. After all, he added, the song “Friend Like Me” in “Aladdin” is similarly challenging, and “I’ve been running my lips over those words for a long time.”

Mr. Iglehart had his debut on Broadway as a replacement cast member in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” in 2007, and later starred in the Tony-winning “Memphis.” On television, he has appeared on Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (as the rival of Titus Andromedon, played by the Broadway actor Tituss Burgess) and will be in a coming Disney Channel series based on the animated film “Tangled.”

January 16, 2017 Hot on the Trail of ‘La La Land,’ Here Come More Movie Musicals By Brooks Barnes

LOS ANGELES — Dead. Embalmed. Buried. A year ago, that is what most movie studios would have said about live-action musicals, pointing to a long line of box office calamities: “Rock of Ages,” “Burlesque,” “Jersey Boys,” “Across the Universe,” “Nine.”

The few out-and-out successes in recent decades have been adaptations of Broadway classics (“Les Misérables,” 2012) or marketed in misleading ways. When 20th Century Fox was selling Baz Luhrmann’s hit “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001, the studio was so afraid that people would stay home if they knew it was a musical that the trailer rather awkwardly tried to avoid singing at all costs.

But Hollywood, excited in part by the critical and commercial success of “La La Land,” which cost Lionsgate $30 million to make and has taken in $132 million worldwide as it streaks toward the Academy Awards, is taking out its jazz hands again.

There are roughly 20 musicals in the works at studios, according to the film database IMDBpro. Some are live- action adaptations of classic animated musicals, like “Beauty and the Beast,” directed by Bill Condon and set for release by Disney in March. Others are films (among them, “Wicked”) based on contemporary Broadway hits.

Moreover, several studios — for the first time since the 1990s — are devoting meaningful resources to break- into-song films with original music. This year, Fox will release “The Greatest Showman,” which stars Hugh Jackman as the circus impresario P. T. Barnum; it has a dozen original songs. Disney has “Bob the Musical,” about a man whose life becomes filled with song after a head injury. Universal Pictures won a bidding war for an untitled musical comedy starring Josh Gad, with original songs by the composer-lyricists Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.

There are several reasons for renewed studio interest, said Marc Platt, a “La La Land” producer whose other projects include an original song-and-dance film that will star Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig and a sequel to “Mary Poppins” with a new score.

“Thankfully, as much as Hollywood is interested in brands, I think people are still looking for originality and freshness,” Mr. Platt said. “Musicals can also be their own brand: They have an event status. I also think the ceiling on the audience is lifting. You’ve got a new generation of fans who have grown up with television shows like ‘Glee.’”

Mr. Platt added, “Music has a way of getting inside all of us and lifting us up.” Put another way, there is an inherent entertainment proposition in musicals, a heightened emotional experience that people go to the movies to find.

Mr. Platt, a former senior executive at Universal (and the father of Ben Platt, star of the hit stage production “Dear Evan Hansen”), has in many ways become Hollywood’s go-to producer of movie musicals. In 2014, he shepherded Disney’s adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods,” which took in $213 million worldwide. As a major force behind “Wicked” on Broadway, Mr. Platt is working with Stephen Daldry (who directed the film version of “Billy Elliot”) to bring a movie version to theaters in 2019.

“Yes, still on track,” Mr. Platt said of that long-gestating project.

Nothing fuels a Hollywood boom (or a boomlet, as the case may be with musicals) like a track record of success. And some studio executives said that they were becoming more open to musicals because the animated variety had experienced such a renaissance. “Frozen” was a monster hit, selling $1.3 billion in tickets worldwide. Over the past few months, three animated musicals — “Sing,” “Moana” and “Trolls” — have taken in a combined $1 billion at the global box office. Disney will release a singalong version of “Moana” (with lyrics on the screen, karaoke style) on Jan. 27.

Some studios have also had recent success with pseudo-musicals, including films like “Pitch Perfect” that rely on pop hits and mostly keep the singing to stage settings. Television may also be giving film executives confidence; specials like “The Wiz Live!” and “Grease: Live” have reintroduced break-into-song entertainment to a mass audience.

Still, not everyone in Hollywood is convinced of a musical comeback. Kevin Goetz, chief executive of the film research company Screen Engine/ASI, said in an email that he had no research indicating increased demand. “I think it’s a long shot to think that animated movies with music, which have been around for years now, have a material effect in increasing the desire to see live-action musicals,” he added.

If “La La Land” is an exception to the box office rules, it is becoming quite an exception. On social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, young people — no prompting from Lionsgate, it promises — have been uploading videos of themselves singing “Audition,” one of the film’s showcase numbers. During the past week, the soundtrack has shot up the sales charts.

“La La Land,” starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as aspiring performers, won a record seven Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 8, including one for Damien Chazelle’s directing and one for Justin Hurwitz’s score. Powered by that publicity pop, the film took in about $14.5 million over the weekend (its sixth in release) in North America. The producers of “La La Land” also include Jordan Horowitz and Fred Berger.

The weekend’s No. 1 film was the feel-good drama “Hidden Figures,” which collected a strong $20 million. Produced by Chernin Entertainment and Levantine Films and released by Fox, “Hidden Figures” has a domestic total after four weeks of about $54.8 million.

January 16, 2017 Review: ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’: Oh Gosh, I’ve Turned Into My Mother By Ben Brantley

The world has opened up for the poisonously insular mother and daughter of Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which has been given an expansive revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For starters, the rural Irish digs shared by Mag and Maureen Folan, one of the nastiest family units ever to grace (or disgrace) a stage, are larger than when this satanically funny pair first arrived in New York nearly two decades ago.

As seen at the Atlantic Theater Company — and subsequently on Broadway — in 1998, “Beauty Queen” placed its characters in a clammy, coffinlike home that seemed a natural breeding ground for mildew and hostility. In this latest version — directed, as the original was, by Garry Hynes for the Druid company — their shabby living quarters stretch beneath a vast expanse of sky, hinting hopefully at life beyond the tight little town of the title.

Such a change in perspective, the work of the set designer Francis O’Connor, fits the cathedralic dimensions of the stage at the Academy’s Harvey Theater, where the production runs through Feb. 5. But the enlargement isn’t only physical.

The four characters of this early work by Mr. McDonagh, an Anglo-Irish dramatist with a wit as hard and black as anthracite coal, also appear to have grown a few sizes. They’re more overtly comic than they were before and less likely to disturb an unsuspecting audience.

In other words, they’re more companionable than they used to be. That means they’re also less likely to creep into your nightmares and break your heart.

For anyone who saw the first incarnation of “Beauty Queen,” it’s hard not to miss Mag, Maureen and the fellas who came calling on them when they were bad. That version was about as ideal an introduction to New York as a young playwright like Mr. McDonagh, then still in his 20s, could wish. (His other work includes “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and the brilliant, brutal “Pillowman.”) That “Beauty Queen” was as tightly wound as a Hitchcock movie, and when it finally unspooled, it shocked hard.

The play was showered with prizes, and three of its four cast members won Tony Awards. The one who took best actress was Marie Mullen, who portrayed Maureen, a 40-year-old virgin shackled to her imperious, housebound mother, Mag (the splendidly slatternly Anna Manahan).

That Ms. Mullen has returned in the role of Mag makes this latest “Beauty Queen” a must-see for theater geeks. How often, after all, do you get to watch a first-rate actress testifying so concretely to the notion that all women turn into their mothers? In this case, that cliché takes on an especially cruel resonance, since the last thing Maureen (now played by Aisling O’Sullivan) wants to hear is that she’s morphing into Mom.

So perhaps it might be of some comfort to the Maureen whom Ms. Mullen originated to learn that her Mag is not like Ms. Manahan’s. Seated immobile in her rocking chair, she’s still a sight to sear eyes, an ungodly hybrid of Gertrude Stein and a Cabbage Patch doll. This Mag, too, is a maddening model of passive aggression, especially when she’s hinting that she knows more than her daughter does.

But Ms. Mullen endows Mag with some of the same vulnerability that made her Maureen so affecting. With her conspicuously burned hand and slightly cowed demeanor, this Mag isn’t the baleful, suffocating force that Ms. Manahan was. She even has a granny-ish twinkle at times.

In contrast, Ms. O’Sullivan’s Maureen appears more confident, competent and less beaten down than Ms. Mullen’s did. She is also conventionally pretty enough that when an unexpected suitor, Pato Dooley (a charmingly bashful Marty Rea), enters her life, it doesn’t seem out of place when he gallantly describes her with the epithet of the title.

This gives Maureen more of an upper hand than before in the Punch and Judy (or Judy and Judy) show of power plays and recriminations that defines her daily existence. Barbed witticisms land with stinging efficiency. (Ms. O’Sullivan does beautifully with my favorite, when she refers to a fire poker as an object “of sentimental value.”)

But you’re more aware of the jokes as jokes, and also of the dramatist’s calculations behind the twists of plot. And on occasion, the performances — especially that of Aaron Monaghan as Pato’s goofy brother, Ray — summon the presence of an unheard laugh track.

When the show creeps and then plunges into pitch darkness in its later scenes, some audience members may feel betrayed. Perhaps not, though. In this age of censorship-free cable and streaming comedy, we’ve become used to shows that uncover and flaunt the sadism that always lurked beneath classic laugh fests of domestic dysfunction.

If this “Beauty Queen” lacks the power to rattle as its first version did, it still makes for a smooth, easily digested evening’s entertainment. In 1998, though, I’d have been astounded to think that I’d ever describe this sharp, sinister jewel of a play in such terms.

January 14, 2017 Review: ‘Time of Women’ Portrays Activists Haunted by a K.G.B. Ordeal By Ben Brantley The murk and dankness of a jail cell enfold the characters of “Time of Women” like a fog that refuses to lift even when the sun is out. In this intensely acted, claustrophobic play from the remarkable underground company the Belarus Free Theater, which runs through Sunday as part of the Under the Radar festival, life is saturated with the stench of incarceration, and no one is pretending that the smell will go away.

The three female journalists and political activists portrayed here ask one another if they dream about the weeks they spent in the K.G.B. prison in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in the winter of 2010 after being arrested for taking part in a political protest during a presidential election. No, they all agree, the dreams have stopped. As one of them puts it, “It invades my waking life instead.”

Written by Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, and directed by Mr. Khalezin, “Time of Women” is a memory play of an unusually harsh grain. Shaped from interviews with the women on whom its characters are based, this production places a dark past and a flickering present in uneasy, overlapping conjunction, and it’s often hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

The show’s single set would at first seem to represent only the living room and kitchen of the modest, reasonably comfortable home where Natalya (Maryna Yurevich), Iryna (Maryia Sazonava) and Nasta (Yana Rusakevich) have gathered for a Christmastime reunion. But why is there a bunk bed on the premises, and an institutional-looking desk?

That’s the furniture of their time in captivity — the bed they shared in a cell and the desk they sat or stood before to be interrogated by a K.G.B. investigator, Colonel Orlov (Kiryl Kanstantsinau). One minute, one of the women is making a cake or drying her hair; the next, she’s back — and I mean, physically — in Amerikanka, as the K.G.B. prison in Minsk was known. And there’s almost nothing in the way of the usual narrative conventions that signal the borders between here and then, now and then.

That blurring of boundaries was even more dizzying the first time I saw “Time of Women,” with the same cast, in September 2015. That was on the production’s opening night in Minsk, and the theater, such as it was, was a private apartment. The audience, crammed into one end of the living room, had arrived in staggered groups by a back staircase, after first assembling at a designated public meeting place a block or so away.

Performing — and attending — a play like “Time of Women” is illegal in Belarus, commonly identified as the last dictatorship in Europe. Many of the show’s rehearsals had been conducted by Skype, since Mr. Khalezin and Ms. Kaliada, who are married, are living in exile in London.

It is, of course, impossible to recreate here the tension level of that performance, which took place amid the threat of arrest. But the Tisch School of the Arts Shop Theater at New York University, where the play has been restaged, is suitably small and confining. And the original cast is, if anything, better than when I first saw it, investing the characters with the undiluted emotional rawness that has become a signature of this troupe.

The words are spoken in Russian, with projected supertitles. Yet the fierceness of the acting often transcends language. You don’t need translation to infer the crude genius of the interrogation techniques of Mr. Kanstantsinau’s Orlov — who slurps noodle soup while predicting the bleak futures of the women he’s questioning.

Or to recognize the plaintive self-reassurance in the rhythmic physical undulations that Ms. Yurevich’s Natalia sustains as she carefully remembers remembering her early days out of prison, when freedom felt like an illusion that could evaporate in an instant. Then there’s the wordless, air-rending scream that rises from the throat of Ms. Rusakevich’s Nasta toward the play’s end.

That scream erupts in the present tense, when the women are together again and prison is behind them. Sort of. The scream, says Nasta, is “the sound of these last few years. … except louder.” She wonders, in a speculation that suggests the mission of both the play and the company that created it, “if anyone else can hear it.”

January 16, 2017 Laurie Carlos, Actress in ‘For Colored Girls,’ Dies at 67 By William Grimes

Laurie Carlos, an actor who appeared in the original production of Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed poetic drama “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” and a playwright whose work expressed the inner lives of black women in the United States, died on Dec. 29 in St. Paul. She was 67.

The cause was colon cancer, her daughter, Ambersunshower Smith, said.

Ms. Carlos joined the cast of “Colored Girls” in 1975 when it was gestating at bars on the Lower East Side. She followed it on its journey from the New Federal Theater to the Public Theater to the Booth Theater on Broadway, and onward to a television adaptation seen on the PBS series “American Playhouse” in 1982.

As the Lady in Blue, she was one of seven characters telling stories of love, loss and the patriarchy in a fusion of dance and declamation that Ms. Shange called a “choreopoem.” Ms. Carlos enacted the poetic monologues “Abortion Cycle #1,” “I Used to Live in the World” and “No More Love Poems #3” and appeared in ensemble pieces throughout the play.

In 1977 The Village Voice gave an Obie Award to Ms. Carlos and the rest of the cast, as well as to Ms. Shange and the play’s director, Oz Scott.

After appearing in Ms. Shange’s “Spell #7” and Edgar White’s “Les Femmes Noir” at the Public Theater, Ms. Carlos branched out into writing, directing and performance art. Her plays “Nonsectarian Conversations With the Dead” (1985), “Organdy Falsetto” (1987) and “White Chocolate for My Father” (1990) were abstract, associative dramas that fused politics and poetry as they delineated the predicaments of black women.

From the outset, she was clear about her aims. “In America, in the early ’60s, the voices of black people were very minimalized,” she told Bomb magazine in 1993. “I wanted to be able to use my voice as an artist for political reasons as well as aesthetic reasons. The two are not very far apart.”

She was born Laurie Dorothea Smith on Jan. 25, 1949, in Manhattan, and grew up in public housing on Avenue D on the Lower East Side. Her father, Walter, was a drummer. Her mother, the former Mildred Randall, was a postal worker.

In Ms. Smith’s early teens she began acting with Mobilization for Youth, a social-services agency on the Lower East Side. After graduating from the High School for the Performing Arts, she studied with Lloyd Richards at the Negro Ensemble Company, where she worked as an usher.

Harry Belafonte noticed her work and hired her to train as a casting agent at his production company, Belafonte Enterprises.

She took the name Carlos from a man with whom she had a short romantic relationship. His full name is unknown. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three sisters, Donna, Riki and Neveley Smith; a half

sister, Tanya Foster; three half brothers, Warren and Walter Smith and Iya Mariano Malango; and three grandchildren.

In the late 1980s Ms. Carlos joined Robbie McCauley and Jessica Hagedorn to form Thought Music, a performance-art group that created the updated minstrel show “Teenytown” at Franklin Furnace in 1988.

Ms. Carlos won two New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. The first came in 1989 for her performance in the two-part multimedia production “Heat,” which she directed with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of the dance company Urban Bush Women. In 1993 she was given a Bessie as creator and choreographer of “White Chocolate for My Father,” presented at Performance Space 122.

In 1998, Ms. Carlos moved to St. Paul to become an artistic fellow with the Penumbra Theater Company. She played an important role in encouraging new playwrights and performers through Naked Stages, a fellowship program based at the Pillsbury House Theater, and through the theater’s Late Nite Series, which featured new work by artists from New York and Minnesota.

She gave her final performance this past fall at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater in St. Paul, narrating “Queen,” a play about gun violence and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“She put the world as she knew it onstage with real style and understanding,” Lou Bellamy, the founder of Penumbra, told The Minneapolis Star-Tribune after her death, “and she lived her art.”

January/February 2017

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January 18-31, 2017

January 18, 2017