Wendell Pierce, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and More Set for Broadway Salute by African American Film Critics Association

Covid isn’t done with New York’s theater scene just yet. At least four Broadway and major Off Broadway productions have either canceled or postponed performances or temporarily replaced principal cast members in the last week due to the virus.

Clayton Davis MGM and United Artists Releasing have revealed their acting submissions for all of their titles, particularly “Bones and All,” “Till” and “Women Talking.” “Women Talking,” written and directed by Sarah Polley, has opted to put Rooney Mara up in the best actress category while the rest of her female co-stars — Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett, Liv McNeil, August Winter, Kira Guloien and Shayla Brown — will campaign in supporting actress. The most prominent male actor in the film, Ben Whishaw, will be the only one campaigning for best supporting actor. Mara enters a very stacked lead actress race that includes Cate Blanchett (“Tár”), Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”). The universal acclaim for the film adaptation of the popular book could help propel her into the fold, especially given her two prior nominations for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2011) and “Carol” (2015).

Black celebrities have been buying out theatres playing “The Woman King” so viewers can experience the film for free, something that the movie’s director says is “incredibly moving” to her.

Broadway box office held steady at $28,621,480 last week as a slate of new productions began or continued previews (Almost Famous and Kimberly Akimbo filled more than 90% of their seats), MJ and Leopoldstadt set house records and The Phantom of the Opera was once again standing room only as the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical heads toward its Feb. 18 closing.

EJ Panaligan editor To celebrate October being National Book Month, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation released a new promotional video for its reading initiative Storyline Online featuring actors and children’s literacy advocates Nancy Cartwright, Terry Crews, Rosario Dawson, Jennifer Garner, Joel McHale and Seth Meyers. Endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, the reading initiative also offers free educational activity guides aligned with Common Core Standards. The guides provide supplemental learning resources and support for teachers in classrooms, in addition to parents with school-aged children at home. “All kids need to know is that while you may have best friends out there in the real world, here at Storyline Online, you have book friends,” Garner says in the video.

Kicking off the nomination season, ‘Fire Of Love’ with seven and ‘Good Night Oppy’ with six lead all comers in nominations for the 7th Annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards.

Trai Byers and Grace Gealey are expecting!

Danielle Brooks celebrated the opening night of her Broadway show The Piano Lesson just days ago and she sadly has to take a break from performing as she just tested positive for COVID-19.

Michael Appler When Tony and Emmy-nominee Danielle Brooks was 17 years old, at home in Greenville, S.C., she picked up a copy of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle,” a canon of 10 plays spanning the 20th century which chronicled African American life in its most vivid, lyrical and intimate settings yet written for the stage. Sifting through the collection, she picked out “The Piano Lesson” and read it, thumbing across the names of African American actors and actresses whom she didn’t yet know. “Today is about preservation,” she told Variety on Thursday at the opening night of the first Broadway revival of “The Piano Lesson,” in which Brooks stars as Berniece alongside Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington.

EXCLUSIVE: Gaia Scodellaro is set to join Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning in Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer 3 for Sony Pictures. Written by Richard Wenk, the film will being produced by Escape Artists’ Academy Award nominee Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, and Steve Tisch as well as Washington, and Fuqua.

opened Thursday night on Broadway, is mostly in tune.  The August Wilson play’s greatest asset is its young leads John David Washington and Danielle Brooks, both of whom are already widely admired, but display an altogether new and enticing range of skills. 2 hours and 45 minutes, with one intermission. At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W.

There’s abundant magic still in The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s grand, 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning tale of a Black family torn between legacy and ambition, the past and the future, and, it’s not an overstatement to note, between life and death.

Clayton Davis Director Gina Prince-Bythewood knows you can’t win an argument on Twitter. That’s why she stays off social media platforms and chose not to engage with users that were attacking her, and the filmmakers from her box office hit “The Woman King” for taking license in its depiction of the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the 17th to 19th centuries, and its role in the slave trade. “There was an absolute assumption we weren’t dealing with it,” Prince-Bythewood says. “So much of the argument is based on bad facts. So, what the ‘Wikipedia historians’ are parroting is history written from the wrong point of view.” Listen below:

Brent Lang Executive Editor Samuel L. Jackson had his marching orders. So when actor John David Washington approached him for tips about playing Boy Willie, a role Jackson originated in the 1987 production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” he clammed up. “I was specifically told by the director not to give him advice,” Jackson says. “John David asked several times, but when he realized that I was not allowed to help him, he stopped asking.” The director, in this case, is LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who also happens to be Jackson’s wife, as well as the first woman to oversee a production of Wilson’s work on Broadway. The two are teaming up on the hotly anticipated revival of the classic drama, only this time Sam is playing Boy Willie’s uncle, Doaker Charles. It marks his first time on Broadway since 2011’s “The Mountaintop,” in which he played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and LaTanya’s  first time directing after a run of acclaimed stage performances, including the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” and 2018’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

EXCLUSIVE: Amblin Partners have picked up the sci-fi feature The Exchange, from writer Brian Watkins and producers Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Tony Shaw, of Escape Artists. Watkins will pen script with Black, Blumenthal and Shaw producing through their Escape Artists banner. Steve Tisch and David Bloomfield are exec producing 

Crossword-Solver reviewed almost 3,000 movie scripts to find the actors that have dropped the most F-bombs in their careers, as well as the old favorites “sh–” and “hell.”Starting with the F-word, Newark-born Joe Pesci has dropped the explicative 272 times in all of his movies – more than any other actor.While the actor was infamous for his F-word rant in “Goodfellas” as gangster Tommy DeVito — “You said I’m funny. How the f – – k am I funny, what the f – – k is so funny about me?” — it’s actually not his most cuss-laden movie.

The African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) will present AAFCA Salutes Broadway on Monday, October 17th at the Lamb’s Club in the heart of New York’s theater district.

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s classic tragedy of the American Dream gone sour, is revitalized and given room to encompass the Black experience in director Miranda Cromwell’s intriguing production opening at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway tonight. Boasting flat-out terrific performances – Wendell Pierce as Willie Loman and the amazing Sharon D Clarke as his wife Linda – this Death of a Salesman doesn’t so much reinvent Miller’s masterpiece as open its doors to perspectives that enrich the material.