Photo by Craig Schwartz
Bob Verini - Arts In LA
Noted monodrama writer and performer Daniel Beaty has clearly invested considerable emotion in researching his two-hour portrait of the great Paul Robeson (1898–1976), whose race, progressive politics, and insistence on doing and saying anything and consequences be damned literally demolished his career and reputation. Beaty’s labors are backed up at the Mark Taper Forum by a ton of stagecraft marshaled by director Moisés Kaufman… Read more…
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter
Paul Robeson, his father born in slavery, achieved international celebrity as an athlete and scholar, singer and actor, activist and role model. Still, even observed with the healing distance of time, he remains a polarizing figure, a spokesman for humankind yet resolutely his own man. He was widely reviled as a traitor during the Cold War even by his erstwhile allies, his passport revoked and his career destroyed. In our house, when the children were growing up, no Thanksgiving could be celebrated without hearing him sing the patriotic “Ballad for Americans,” which he first recorded in 1939. Read more…
Now running through May 25.
