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Broadway's Jawan M. Jackson will join Norm Lewis and the company of Lonne Elder III's masterpiece Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, for the final week of its limited Off-Broadway engagement. From June 23 – 29, Jackson will assume the role of Blue Haven. Calvin M. Thompson plays the role through June 22. In addition to Norm Lewis, the cast of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men features Felicia Boswell, James Foster Jr., Morgan Siobhan Green, Jeremiah Packer, and Bryce Michael Wood. Jawan M. Jackson is a Detroit native best known for originating the role of Melvin Franklin in Broadway's Motown The Musical and Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations. His performance in Ain't Too Proud earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album. In 2022, Jackson made history by...

The new production of Lonne Elder III's play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, starring Tony, Emmy and SAG Award nominee Norm Lewis, has extended by six weeks. Directed by the legendary Clinton Turner Davis, the new production – the first in New York City in nearly 40 years – has extended its limited run at Theatre at St. Clements through June 29. For tickets and information, visit ThePeccadillo.com. It's New York in the 1950s. Russell Parker, a ne'er-do-well barber and the widowed father of three adult children, spends his days playing checkers and reminiscing about his life in vaudeville as a song and dance man. His two sons, Theo and Bobby, are dreamers of a different sort – a pair of petty criminals looking for a “score" in...

The Godfather trilogy received a total of 9 Academy Awards, with The Godfather winning 3 and Part II receiving 6 awards. The iconic film series, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, remains a touchstone in popular culture even 50 years after its first release. The screenplay for The Godfather series, co-written by Mario Puzo and Coppola, expertly translated the novel's themes into a cinematic masterpiece.

The Godfather trilogy included some of the most acclaimed movies of all time, went on to take home nine Academy Awards, and received an astounding 28 nominations. As one of the crowning achievements in director Francis Ford Coppola's vast and varied career, more than 50 years since the first film was released, The Godfather series has remained an important touchstone in popular culture. With fantastic performances, unmatched screenplays, and an iconic aesthetic, The Godfather films received acclaim at the time of their release, and their reputation has only grown over the years.

Douglas Turner Ward, the director, actor and playwright who co-founded the landmark, influential Off Broadway Black theater group the Negro Ensemble Company, died Saturday, Feb. 20, at his home in New York City. He was 90.

His death was announced by his wife Diana Ward.

Ward had already begun a solid New York stage acting career in the 1950s and ’60s – including Off Broadway roles in The Iceman Cometh and on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun – when, according to The New York Times, he wrote a 1966 editorial for that newspaper headlined “American Theater: For Whites Only?” The article called for the establishment of a Black repertory theater company. Turner wrote, “Not in the future…but now!”

A year later the Ford Foundation awarded a $434,000 grant to create the Negro Ensemble Company with Ward as artistic director, along with Robert Hooks and Gerald S. Krone in other leadership roles.

The Company...

Coming to Film Forum in New York City is “Black Women,” a 70-film screening series that spotlights 81 years – 1920 to 2001 – of trailblazing African American actresses in American movies.

Scheduled to run from January 17 to February 13, the series is curated by film historian and professor Donald Bogle, author of six books concerning blacks in film and television, including the groundbreaking “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films” (1973).

“Last year, Bruce Goldstein, the repertory programmer at Film Forum, asked me if there was something I was interested in doing, and this was a topic that I had been thinking about, because I recently updated my book on the subject, ‘Brown Sugar,’ which dealt with African American women in entertainment from the early years of the late 19th century to the present,” said Bogle. “That’s really the way it came about, and it just developed from there.

For the first time ever, the Academy has nominated three black screenwriters for Oscars in the same year. Barry Jenkins and Tarell McCraney shared an Adapted Screenplay nomination for “Moonlight,” along with the late August Wilson for “Fences.” The previous record happened in 1972, when two black screenwriters socred nominations: Suzanne De Plasse for “Lady Sings the Blues” and Lonne Elder III for “Sounder.” Both were the first African-Americans to earn a screenwriting nomination from the Academy. Also Read: 'La La Land' Ties Oscar Record With 14 Nominations It’s a big shift for the Oscars nomination list, as this year’s field sees a.

Sounder (1972) Direction: Martin Ritt Cast: Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, Kevin Hooks, Carmen Mathews, Taj Mahal, James Best Screenplay: Lonne Elder III; from William H. Armstrong's book Oscar Movies Paul Winfield, Sounder, Kevin Hooks, Sounder Sounder probably features more extremely wide shots than any movie besides Lawrence of Arabia — and Martin Ritt's movie is only half as long. Time and again, humans become antish dots on the horizon, visually overwhelmed by the vast wilderness around them. That's Ritt's way of establishing the world of David (Kevin Hooks), a young boy living in the Louisiana woods with his sharecropper family and the titular dog during the Great Depression. That world completely envelops him in these shots, which perform the old pastoral trick of contrasting the human and temporary and insignificant with the eternal realm of nature. Ritt, however, sets that up in order to subvert it. Ultimately, the boy must...

From June 4th thru the 27th, the New Federal Theatre in New York City will present a series of play readings titled, Great Black Plays & Playwrights.

25 plays will be read, spanning the beginning of the Black Theatre Movement in the 1960’s thru the present day. Highlights include Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls…, Amari Baraka’s A Recent Killing, Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Laurence Holder’s When Chickens Come Home to Roost, Suzan Lori-Parks’ TopDog/UnderDog, James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Pearle Cleage’s Flyin’ West, and many more.

Trezana Beverly, who won a Tony Award for her performance in the original Broadway production of For Colored Girls…, will direct the reading of it here. Other scheduled directors include Talvin Wilks, Clinton Turner Davis, Allie Woods and more. No casting has been announced yet.

Readings will...