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Ahead of the 78th Tony Awards, Gypsy star and current nominee Audra McDonald took to Instagram to share a message with the Broadway community. Sharing her thoughts on the "crazy day," the performer noted that, due to Tony Awards rehearsals, she would miss Gypsy's June 8 matinee performance. Instead, her "incredible standby", Tryphena Wade, took her place for the show, for which McDonald said she is "so grateful." The bulk of her video was a reflection on the art of theater and its monumental impact on the people who make it and the lives it touches: "I wanted to get on the interwebs and say to those who love the theater, in whatever aspect you touch the theater, as a performer, someone who works on...

Set in the wetlands of Georgia, Fairfax Pictures’ newest cinematic collaboration with Regal Cinemas for Black History Month is The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story. The horror movie dives into the folklore of the Gullah people, an African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the lower regions of the US. One of the more fantastical aspects of this heritage is the mythical creature known as the Boo Hag, which sucks the breath or soul out of its unknowing victim. While the person is put into a deep, trance-like sleep filled with haunting dreams, the witch — akin to a vampire of sorts — will gallivant around, mimicking the human and fooling others.

Here, the story revolves around a woman named Leah (Tryphena Wade) and her husband, Asa Robbins (actor Stephen Cofield), who move from their cozy and lavish life in New York City to Asa’s deceased mother’s home in the backwoods of Georgia.

On their way back to the house where his parents lived before the recent death of his mother, Asa (Stephen Cofield Jr) and Leah (Tryphena Wade) pass a blue gate. It’s a very distinctive shade of blue and, whilst it might seem unremarkable to the average person, anyone who has spent time in a Geechee community like this one will recognise that it has been coloured that way in an effort to ward off the boo hag. To Asa – as to Geechee screenwriter J Craig Gordon – this is just part of life. To Leah, it’s the first of many mysteries in a place where she will feel more and more desperately out of her depth.

The Geechee are the descendants of people who were enslaved by white Americans, so there’s a further unsettling moment when the car pulls up outside the house – a plantation house, with all the.

The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story

When Hollywood tells stories about witches, they’re generally set in fantasy worlds or in the past, but for many people, witches are a part of the modern world and belief in them is very real. That’s the case for the Geechee people in the southern US, and it’s a belief system explored in the latest film from Jeremiah Kipp, director of festival hit Slapface. In The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story, a woman follows her husband back to the place where he was born and encounters a network of beliefs that are entirely new to her. She gradually comes to realise that she may be in very real danger. I met up with Jeremiah and with lead actress Tryphena Wade to learn more about this unusual film.

“J Craig Gordon was the real originator of this idea because he...