Blair Underwood & Nicole Ari Parker in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE on Broadway

This season, desire is taking on a whole new rhythm as the greatest play  from America’s most celebrated playwright sizzles onto the stage at The Broadhurst Theatre. From the producers of the trailblazing 2008 Broadway production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, starring James Earl Jones and Terrence Howard, comes a hot new take on Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire. Leading this sizzling new cast is Blair Underwood (L.A. Law) in his Broadway debut as Stanley Kowalski, Nicole Ari Parker (Soul Food) as Blanche DuBois, Daphne Rubin-Vega (Rent) as Stella Kowalski and Wood Harris (The Wire) as Mitch. Directed by Emily Mann (Artistic Director of Princeton’s esteemed McCarter Theatre) and featuring an original score by five-time Grammy Award® winner Terence Blanchard, this scintillating Streetcar brings a whole new rhythm to Williams’ enduring portrait of sex, class and secrets in one of America’s most fascinating and diverse cities. Come and feel the heat.  Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street, NYC. Performance ScheduleTues 7pm, Wed 2 & 8pm, Thurs 7pm, Fri 8pm, Sat 2 & 8pm, Sun 3pm Week ending July 8: Mon 7pm, Tues 7pm, Wed-Dark-July 4th, Thurs 7pm, Fri 8pm, Sat 2 & 8pm Sun 2 & 8pm BUY NOW and SAVE OVER 35%* Front Orchestra & Front Mezzanine $79.50 to $89.50* Rear Orchestra & Middle Mezzanine $69.50* Rear Mezzanine $49.50* *Offer valid on select performances and seat locations. Restrictions may apply. Visit BroadwayOffers.com mention code: ASFLY79 or call 212 947-8844 For groups pf 10 or more, call Toni, 718 703-2260

The Scottsboro Boys: Racism and razzle-dazzle

By J. KELLY NESTRUCK

No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.

Fast forward to Fall 2010, in their two most famous works, Cabaret and Chicago, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb used popular forms of entertainment as metaphors for our tainted world. A resigned Sally Bowles insisted that “life is a cabaret,” while cocksure Billy Flynn asserted that “it's all a circus … the whole world, all show business.”

The Scottsboro Boys, Kander and Ebb's troubling new musical, begins with a slightly less definitive pronouncement. “Everyone's a minstrel tonight,” sings the Interlocutor (Tony Award winner John Cullum, the only Caucasian in the cast) at the start of this show that repurposes the trappings of minstrelsy to revisit a racial injustice from the not-so-distant past.

Now getting its Broadway premiere in a powerful and unsettling production by Susan Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys is in fact the final collaboration between Kander and Ebb, assuming the former doesn't have any unfinished shows hiding away in a drawer somewhere. (Ebb died in 2004.)

Under the command of the Interlocutor, a company of dynamic African-American performers perform the true story of the Scottsboro boys with a little help – and hindrance – from the sadistic stock minstrel characters Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones (the formidable caricaturists Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo),

Riding the rails in 1931 Alabama, nine black boys aged from 12 to 19 were arrested and accused of the gang rape of two white women. After they were sentenced to death, their objectionable convictions became a cause célèbre that led to the Supreme Court and, at one point, to 300,000 Americans protesting in 110 U.S. cities.

As the illiterate Haywood Patterson, who eventually learned to write and penned a book in prison, Winnipeg-born Joshua Henry gives a tremendous lead performance. Throughout his incarceration, Haywood remains defiant and tells the truth even when, in a cruel paradox, a lie would set him free. Henry plays him with a quivering, furious integrity, but also enough flawed humanity that he never turns into a symbol.

While Henry showed off his tank of a body in Green Day's American Idiot earlier this year, he now gets to prove what kind of dramatic ammunition he is packing in numbers like Nothin', in which, stuck in an impossible situation, Haywood performs a brutally slow, mocking shuck-and-jive.

Kander's catchy music – a mix of ragtime and American folk song – is effectively undercut by Ebb's lyrics. A song like Southern Days is beautiful, even as its ironic lyrics aim to wring all the nostalgia out of standards like My Old Kentucky Home that owe their origins to minstrel shows.

Stroman, who showed that nothing succeeds like excess with The Producers, here directs with impressive economy. With a few quick movements, the cast transforms the simple set of chairs and wooden planks into, for instance, a train chugging out of Chattanooga with tambourines for wheels.

Her most chilling staging comes during Electric Chair, a dream tap ballet in which the youngest of the boys (the naturally talented Jeremy Gumbs) has a nightmare about his upcoming execution that turns into what seems like a mad Mickey Mouse cartoon (Mickey being one of the few remaining pop-culture icons still to bear the traces of minstrelsy and blackface).

While Stroman's choreography and the energetic performances keep tempting you to enjoy The Scottsboro Boys's spectacle, the form the show takes never allows you to do so with a clear conscience.

The minstrelsy aspects – including a scene in blackface – have proved controversial, with small protests organized outside the show on recent weekends. But the cast's twisted portrayal of the women who made the accusations and the boys' Jewish lawyer are more potentially offensive than anything involving the African-American characters, whose side the show takes unequivocally.

Arts.Advocacy+Wellness: "Post TONY Awards...still/here cause...FELA Lives!!!"

still/here 'cause...FELA Lives!!!

Though some Tony Voters chose commerce over Art, Fela is what theater is: Daring, Celebratory, Inventive, and Universal. In my eyes Fela is BEST MUSICAL of ALL Times!

If you have not seen Fela on Broadway...PLEASE HURRY TO SEE IT.

FELA LIVES!!!!

Everybody say: "Yeah, Yeah"

Visit www.BroadwayOffers.com and use code FEHHC107 for special offer.

Broadway and some Tony voters let me down. Instead of celebrating and honoring a show that is fresh, inventive, daring, moving and celebratory of life and the universal connection we all share - that connection that potentially promotes solidarity and give Hope - some voters thought different. Some voters chose to honor the more oppressively driven shows that are not new in concept, dated topics, and limits our scope on life. While I am congratulatory of the winning nominees, it saddens me to see that a show as poignant as Fela, was not given the recognition from the academy it deserves. I've always found the theater community to be bold/daring and a place for liberation; however with the the results, my point of reference is shifting. There is a lot more we need to learn about ourselves and what message and beliefs we truly stand for. Fela lives in my life and many others. Solidarity, liberation, and peace for ALL. This is what we should celebrate! "Yeah, Yeah!"

CATCH Fela live on Broadway at

The EUGENE O'NEILL Theater - 230 W. 49th St., NYC

www.felaonbroadway.com

Arts.Advocacy+Wellness: "Everybody Say Yeah Yeah - FELA!""

FELA! The Broadway Musical

Brings home 11 TONY Nominations

including BEST MUSICAL!

Arts.Advocacy+Wellness and Cornelius Jones Jr. honor the cast, crew, and creative team of FELA! for making Landmark History and claiming 11 TONY Nominations for the 2009-2010 TONY Award Season.

The Award Ceremony will Broadcast LIVE from Radio City Music Hall on the CBS television network Sunday, June 13, 2010.

Here is a highlight of the Nominations:

• Best Musical
• Best Book of a Musical: Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones
• Best Actor: Sahr Ngaujah
• Best Featured Actress: Lillias White
• Best Direction: Bill T. Jones
• Best Choreography: Bill T. Jones
• Best Orchestrations: Aaron Johnson
• Best Scenic Design: Marina Draghici
• Best Costume Design: Marina Draghici
• Best Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel
• Best Sound Design: Robert Kaplowitz

FELA!, new Broadway musical based on the life of Fela Anikulpo Kuti. An internationally known and traveled Nigerian born composer/musician, celebrated as the pioneer of Afrobeat music. He was an active human rights and political activist. His nonconformist voice landed him amongst political battles and debates that would, at times, land him in jail. Inspired by his mother, a civil rights champion, he defied a corrupt and oppressive military government and devoted his life and music to the struggle for freedom and human dignity. Fela Kuti died on August 2, 1997 from AIDS related complications.

EVERYBODY SAY YEAH YEAH...KERE KAY!!!

For more info visit:

www.felaonbroadway.com

and

www.TonyAwards.com

Tune in next Wednesday for more

Arts.Advocacy+Wellness with Cornelius Jones Jr.

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www.corneliusjonesjr.com

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Twitter: CorneliusJonesJ

FaceBook Fan Page: FlagBoy Official Fan Page of the Actor

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