A sporty love story! JJ Watt and Kealia Ohai Watt’s romance was founded on their shared passion for athletics.
09.12.2022 - 07:27 / deadline.com
Many decades after her brilliant and unsettling plays became seen Off Broadway, at regional theaters or, sometimes, not at all, the great playwright Adrienne Kennedy is making her Broadway debut tonight when her 1992 work Ohio State Murders opens as the inaugural production at the newly renamed James Earl Jones Theatre.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, the acclaimed 91-year-old Kennedy was blunt about why Broadway took so long: “It’s because I’m a Black woman,” she said, and one need look no further than Broadway’s other criminally late embrace – of Alice Childress and her wonderful 1955 play Trouble In Mind, which finally received an exceptional Broadway staging last year – to recognize the truth of the statement.
So the decision to bring Adrienne Kennedy to Broadway – or, perhaps more accurately, to bring Broadway to Adrienne Kennedy – is worthy of praise before so much as a single syllable is uttered on stage. Adrienne Kennedy is on Broadway.
For the occasion, the producers behind the show have assembled an amazing team of creative talent, from director Kenny Leon, one of the best directors working on Broadway right now – see his Topdog/Underdog for the slamdunk proof – to star Audra McDonald, whose talents on both the musical and non-musical stage are among Broadway’s most cherished.
Unfortunately, like nervous parents giving their kids a bit more attention than they might need, Ohio State Murders in a production that’s sometimes just much for its own good, portentous when it needn’t be, with a here-and-there vibe of being overcooked when pared-down simplicity might be called for.
The story itself needs no help grabbing our attention: A fictional tale set on the segregated campus of Ohio State
A sporty love story! JJ Watt and Kealia Ohai Watt’s romance was founded on their shared passion for athletics.
Former That’s So Raven star Orlando Brown has been arrested on a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in Ohio, police confirmed to Deadline.
The wig gives it away, otherwise we’d be hard-pressed to immediately – or even slowly – recognize Paul Bettany’s fast-talking, extroverted and inquisitive artist character in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration as that historic icon of cryptic, mumbled monosyllables Andy Warhol.
A battle off the field. The Ohio State University football player Avery Henry announced his cancer diagnosis on Monday, December 19.
Harvey Weinstein is a “serial predator” and rapist said Jennifer Siebel Newsom today after a Los Angeles jury was unable to come to a unanimous verdict on the much-accused producer’s guilt in allegedly attacking her back in 2005.
Moving right along. One month after they were first linked, Brad Pitt and Ines de Ramon were already celebrating milestones together.
Bertha Barbee McNeal, whose Motown group The Velvelettes had hits with“Needle in a Haystack” and “(He Was) Really Saying Something,” died Thursday in hospice in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was 82 and had colon cancer.
The holiday spirit – at least the kind measured at the box office – seemed to arrive on Broadway last week, for some shows anyway. Obvious case in point: A Christmas Carol, starring Jefferson Mays in his tour de force as every last ghost, miser and Cratchit in the story, was up a bountiful 34% in receipts, taking in $742,010 and filling 83% of seats at the Nederlander.
Ohio State Murders, in which she is on stage for the entirety of the 75-minute play. The very next day, she will perform to a sold-out Carnegie Hall for a solo concert. And that’s all after she drops her six-year-old daughter off at the school bus. “To be honest, ‘me time’ is kind of nonexistent right now,” she says from her New York home.
It’s a sad day for the Orange Is the New Black family…
A shocking loss. Orange Is the New Black alum Brad William Henke has died. He was 56.
Brad William Henke, a former NFL player who segued to acting and appeared in TV series including Orange Is the New Black, Justified and Lost and such films as Pacific Rim and World Trade Center, has died. He was 56. His family said Henke died in his sleep November 28, but no cause was given.
EXCLUSIVE: Susan Storman, the celebrated Broadway director and choreographer, has revealed that an acclaimed UK revival of musical comedy Crazy for You, which features show-stopping numbers from the George and Ira Gershwin songbook, will transfer from the Chichester Festival Theater into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s LW Theatres-owned Gillian Lynne Theatre for a strictly limited 30-week West End season from June 24. Opening night is July 3.