Richarda Abrams in First by Faith. Photo by Allison Lee Levy, Winston-Salem Journal.

I spent much of the week in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, attending the week-long 16th biennial National Black Theatre Festival, which presented 30 plays and musicals from black theaters in 16 states and South Africa.

Founded in 1989, the festival has become an integral part of the life of the city, and goes way beyond just the shows themselves – with free workshops, a film series, celebrity appearances (Leslie Uggams, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Andre de Shields are among those who came down from New York), a huge vendor market , a poetry jam, and many parties. (The festival coincided this year with the annual conference of the American Theatre Critics Association.)

Of the seven shows I got to see, my two favorite both happened to be by New York-based theater artists —  Harlem 9’s “48 Hours in Holy Ground,” six short original plays inspired by (but very different from) African-American classic plays such as Lorraine Hansberry’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”; and “First by Faith: The Life Of Mary McLeod Bethune,” written and performed by Richarda Abrams, one of numerous  (mostly solo) shows about celebrated/historical figures (Others were about cabaret performer Bricktop, Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Booker T. Washington, August Wilson, and Bass Reeves, a freed slave who became the first African-American United States Deputy Marshal, whose life may have inspired the character of the Lone Ranger.)

One of the best aspects of the festival was audience reaction. When Abrams as Bethune said “Your voting rights are still being tampered with and women’s rights are in danger,” the audience as one hummed an “mmmHmmmm” in loud affirmation.

This year’s festival was heavy on musicals, as one of the festival organizers explained, because North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper proclaimed 2019 The Year of Music.

Click on photographs below to read details about some of the NBTF shows, and events, including my micro-reviews of a few of the shows I saw.

Leslie Uggams speaking at National Black Theatre Festival kickoff, next to Brian Stokes Mitchell and Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin, the festival’s executive producer and widow of founder Larry Leon Hamlin Photo by Andrew Dye, Winston Salem Journal.

Brian Stokes Mitchell, from left, dancer Nana Malaya Rucker and Andre Dé Shields pose for a photo for a fan prior to the news conference kicking off the National Black Theatre Festival. Photo by Andrew Dye. Winston Salem Journal

Sammy: Celebrate the Legacy. Performed by David Hayes.

Mother to Mother. The one show from a theater company outside of the United States, this adaptation of Sindiwe Magona’s novel, produced by Spirit Sister Productions of Cape Town, South Africa and performed by Thembi Mtshali tells the story of a South African mother whose son is accused of killing a young white American woman, who was in South Africa to help fight apartheid. The South African mother addresses victim’s mother.

Bricktop: Legend of the Jazz Age. Written and Directed by Cathey C. Sawyer. Performed by Gabrielle Lee.

First By Faith: The Life of Mary McLeod Bethune. This solo play written and performed by Richarda Abrams tells the remarkable journey of the daughter of former slaves who became a world-renowned educator and activist. In an extraordinary performance portraying many characters in Bethune’s life, and Bethune herself at various ages, Abrams reclaims Bethune from the wall of saintly portraits in elementary school classrooms, and breathes her back to life as a woman with feelings, and vulnerabilities, and wit, and, yes, faith. “You must have faith. Faith is the first factor in life devoted to service. Without it nothing is possible. With it nothing is impossible. Faith in God is the greatest power, but great, too, is faith in oneself.”

A vendor of women’s hats

The bus to “Ruined.” The venues are spread throughout the city of Winston-Salem, so the festival provides buses.

Twelfth Night, or what you will, mon” was performed by North Carolina Black Repertory Company outdoors at Winston Square Park. William Shakespeare’s comedy but the setting moved from the Island of Illyria to Jamaica the songs by Bob Marley

March On Written and directed by Daniel Carlton, performed by Blackberry Productions of New York, NY. The journeys of three people who attended the 1963 March on Washington.

Soul Man, written and directed by Nate Jacobs, and performed by the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe of Sarasota, FL. This musical revue, tied together by the thinnest of narrative threads (the old-timers teaching a youngster about the values of the 60s) presents music made popular by 1960s R&B artists such as Sam Cooke, Sam & Dave, James Brown, Otis Redding, The Temptations, Ray Charles

Prideland, performed by THE POINTE! Studio of Dance & Elise Jonell Performance Ensemble of Greensboro, NC. A dance interpretation of the Disney movie “The Lion King.”

“Blood at the Root” written by Dominique Morisseau, performed by North Carolina Central University of Durham, NC. Based on theJena Six case, this play takes a hypothetical, multiple perspective look at the racial chaos of a high school in Jena, Louisiana resulting from the questionable arrest of six African American students for the assault of a white student.

Jelly’s Last Jam, written by George C. Wolfe, performed by North Carolina Black Repertory Company of Winston-Salem, NC. The Tony award-winning musical that tells the true story of Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, a.k.a. Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed “inventor of Jazz.”

The producers, writers, directors and cast who put together the six original plays in “48 Hours in Holy Ground” within 48 hours. Inspired by six classic African American plays, these brief two- or three-character works had their own rhythm and beauty and humor and force.

A person attending the 2019 National Black Theater Festival

July 2019 New York Theater Quiz

Shows opening in New York in August

Broadway shows closing in August
Be More Chill August 11
The Prom August 11
The Cher Show August 18
King Kong August 18
Pretty Woman August 18
What The Constitution Means to Me August 24
Beautiful October 27
Waitress January 5, 2020

The Week in New York Theater News

Harold Prince, January 30, 1928 – July 31, 2019

Harold Prince’s Broadway Shows, Playbill by Playbill

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince

(L-R) Director Hal Prince & composer Stephen Sondheim in a rehearsal shot from. the Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along”, 1981

12 Broadway Luminaries share their Hal Prince stories

Sondheim: One of the astounding things about Hal is that he never listened to music for pleasure, only for work….Hal’s openness to things he didn’t immediately respond to was one of the things that made him such an ideal collaborator.

Susan Stroman:  I received two great pieces of advice from Hal. Travel whenever you can — exposing yourself to different cultures and distinctive art will only enrich your mind and abilities. And make sure that after every opening night, no matter the outcome, you have a meeting for a new project scheduled the very next morning…

‘Six,” a musical/pop concert about the marriage, divorce and beheading of the six wives of Henry VIII that began at the Edinburgh Festival, is coming to Broadway. It’s scheduled to open at the Brooks Atkinson on March 12, 2020

Hannah Senesh, the Anne Frank of Hungary, the Joan of Arc of Israel.

In “Hannah Senesh,” a play running through August 18th at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the title character is a Jewish teenager in Europe in the 1930s who starts keeping a diary at age 13. In it, she complains about the ugly pink party dress her mother bought for her, dreams of her “ideal boy” and observes the growing anti-Semitism around her. “Despite everything I do believe that the world was created for good,” Senesh writes.
Sound familiar?
But half way through “Hannah Senesh,”  it becomes clear that her story swerves in a very different direction from Anne Frank

Red Emm and the Mad Monk by The Tank

#YourMemorial by Pigeonholed

Truth/Dare by Project Y

Entangled by The Amoralists

NYIT Award Nominations 2019: Off-Off Broadway’s Finest

Lucas Hnath

Antoinette Nwandu

Vineyard Theater 2019-2020 season
(specific dates not yet determined)

Conceived and director by Tina Satter
Based on FBI transcripts, this adaptation tells the still unfolding story of former Air Force linguist Reality Winner who is surprised at her home by the FBI, interrogated, and then charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in U.S elections. Reality remains in jail

Dana H. by Lucas Hnath
Dana was a chaplain of a psych ward where she met a charismatic patient, an ex-convict searching for redemption. A harrowing true story, Dana was held captive with her life in this man’s hands — trapped in a series of Florida motels, disoriented and terrified — for five months. Told in Dana’s own words and reconstructed for the stage by her son Lucas Hnath

Tuvalu, or The Saddest Song
By Antoinette Nwandu
Twelve-year-old Jackie tries to make sense of her life in 1990s Los Angeles

Mass Shootings and Theater

Three mass shootings in a single week — in Gilroy, California last Sunday leaving three dead; in El Paso,Texas leaving at least 20 dead yesterday: in Dayton, Ohio, leaving at least nine dead this morning — provoke, once again, many questions. Some of the questions are specific to theater artists and theatergoers.  It was in Dayton two years ago that the Human Race Theatremounted the first full production of a play called “26 Pebbles,” about a previous mass shooting….

In @NYTimes, novelist @viet_t_nguyen on why he hates Miss Saigon (being revived in LA), which “perpetuates deeply held notions of Asian inferiority.” He praises @DavidHenryHwang‘s M Butterly & calls for more Asian narratives.

Read intriguing comments https://t.co/XCTy99SLGy

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) August 4, 2019