Ta-Nehisi Coates' Life Story Coming to the Stage...!
04/26/2017
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From the New York Times:
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ Is Coming to the Apollo

By ANDREW R. CHOW APRIL 26, 2017

“Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s award-winning book exploring racial injustice in America, will be brought to the Apollo stage next April.

Mr. Coates’s fiery work — which made him the National Book Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist — will be adapted into a multimedia performance, with excerpted monologues, video projections, and a score by the jazz musician Jason Moran.

This sounds lame, like some beatnik nightclub poetry reading from 1959:

Portions of Mr. Coates’s letters to his son would be read aloud, while narratives of his experiences at Howard University and in New York City could be performed by actors. …

Mr. Coates will be involved with the project going forward to give “creative guidance,” Ms. Forbes said, and may appear in the production. …

Casting has yet to be announced, but will be fluid over the show’s short run. (Exact dates have not been specified.) “There’s a mix of everyday folks and celebrity voices,” Ms. Forbes said. “One night is going to be vastly different from the next.”

Part of the problem is that Ta-Nehisi’s life story is almost as boring as mine: guy sits at desk and intermittently taps on keyboard.

They’ll need to really gay it way up if they want this show to transfer to the Great White Way. I’m thinking, live on stage, a Giant Escalator on such a huge scale that TNC feels like he’s four-years-old again

Like this, but with dancing black chorus boys in hoodies

with lots of ensemble 1990s hip-hop In Living Color dancing and metaphors lifted from the 1967 movie “Up the Down Staircase.”

[Comment at Unz.com]

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