Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic West End attendance has increased 11 per cent over pre-pandemic levels while Broadway attendance has fallen 17 per cent. As they grapple with divergent new normals, the duelling theatre capitals offer a study in contrast on recent racial justice efforts.Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and concurrent Black Lives Matter protests, Black Broadway blossomed. Plays by Black playwrights won the Pulitzer Prize four years in a row. Slave Play became the most Tony-nominated play ever. And Black playwrights wrote every new play \u2014 seven \u2014 that reopened Broadway. Chicken & Biscuits alone gave Broadway debuts to dozens of Black theatre professionals, including the director, 70 per cent of the cast, and Broadway\u2019s first Black woman sound designer.But many Black Broadway professionals took umbrage at gaining prominence only in chaos and danger. \u201cIt was a joke,\u201d says Andr\u00e9 De Shields, who recently reprised his Tony-winning performance of the Greek god Hermes in the West End\u2019s Hadestown. \u201cIt was Broadway calling themselves allies without asking forgiveness, without risking reputation, without the revolution of reparation. They should\u2019ve invested in what\u2019s in our hearts, what\u2019s on our minds, and all the secrets we\u2019ve kept because they never looked us in our eyes. \u201dUltimately, Slave Play won no Tonys, making it the most Tony-losing play ever. Those seven Black plays were rushed through previews and suffered chronic Covid-related cancellations, then sudden closures. Ain\u2019t Too Proud, a Temptations musical, saw its gross plummet $797,835 in a single week. Thoughts of a Colored Man closed the day after announcing a new cast.\u201cWe need to broaden the idea of what a Black play can be,\u201d says Reynaldo Piniella, one of those doomed thespians, \u201cwithout sanitising the message, without spoon-feeding Black reality. Black joy. Black prosperity. Black belonging. Why can\u2019t Shakespeare in the Park include Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s A Tempest set in the Caribbean?\u201d In 2021, New York\u2019s off-Broadway Public Theater, which runs Shakespeare in the Park, set goals to provide living wages by 2023 and to make its staff, programming, and audiences 70 per cent non-white. The theatre\u2019s communications director declined to comment on any progress.Speaking before his death last year, Ron Simons, a legendary producer of Black theatre, was blunt about Broadway: \u201cIt\u2019s all the same people and they all look white. They want to do the right thing but they don\u2019t know how to talk to or find people who are not white. They just don\u2019t know. We need a Black owned and operated Broadway theatre where we are the final gatekeepers.\u201dWhile Black theatre in New York has walked off a glass cliff, in London the glass ceiling has become a greenhouse. \u201cWe want to revel in joyfulness as an act of resistance,\u201d says Carolyn Forsyth, executive director of Croydon-based Talawa, Britain\u2019s oldest Black theatre company. \u201cCulture is our right.\u201dLynette Linton, whose production of Alterations, a comedy of the 1970s Windrush generation, closed last month after a run at the National Theatre, agrees. \u201cBlack British theatre isn\u2019t new. Its bravery isn\u2019t new. Its creativity isn\u2019t new. And its power isn\u2019t new. It has always been here. What\u2019s changed is that now we can put on a show like Alterations \u2014 written in 1978 \u2014 and celebrate work that was not celebrated as it should have been in its time.\u201dConsider the Black queerness in Blackbird Hour, Black dignity in the Death of England trilogy, Black hustle in Wolves on Road, Black romance in Shifters, or Black history in The Legends of Them, The Lonely Londoners and Princess Essex.For decades Black British theatre was stuck in a cycle mentality \u2014 good years and bad years, feast and famine. \u201cI don\u2019t know if there\u2019s one word for what\u2019s changed in Black British theatre,\u201d says Linton. \u201cBut I do know this: it\u2019s the end of the cycle mentality.\u201dIt\u2019s not just that a lot has changed since 1965, when Laurence Olivier performed Othello in blackface. A lot has changed since 2013, too, when the National Theatre opened its Black Plays Archive, with work dating back to 1909. Or 2018, when amid the backdrop of the Windrush scandal both the Black Ticket Project and British Black Theatre Awards debuted and Natasha Gordon\u2019s intimate Nine Night, about a Black British family attempting a Jamaican tradition of mourning, made her the West End\u2019s first Black British female playwright. Those 21st-century moments were all accelerators of Black excellence across British theatre.Broadway, by contrast, has stumbled. \u201cBroadway is a representation of where America is,\u201d says Zhailon Levingston, who in 2021 became Broadway\u2019s youngest ever Black director, at 27. \u201cBut we\u2019re going to see more original productions with an aim for America starting in London. What it does is test where our American values are.\u201dMuch of Black Broadway\u2019s hope is pinned to Alicia Keys\u2019 Hell\u2019s Kitchen \u2014 which won a Grammy in February \u2014 a Black Gypsy starring Audra McDonald, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019\u00a0new play Purpose, a new Afro-Latino musical about Buena Vista Social Club \u2014 which dominated last week\u2019s Tony nominations with 10 nods \u2014 and The Jellicle Ball, a queer Black retelling of Cats aiming for a second run after closing in September. Meanwhile, Denzel Washington\u2019s Othello has been panned by critics even as its nearly-$1,000 tickets created a record-breaking gross of $2.82mn a week. And a new Louis Armstrong musical \u2014 with a Tony-nominated performance by James Monroe Iglehart \u2014 closed after just 151 shows, including previews.Neither London nor New York consistently track race of theatre professionals citywide, but beyond tent poles such as Hamilton and The Lion King this West End season has Black leads in scores of productions, including Billy Porter in Cabaret, Vanessa Williams in The Devil Wears Prada, half the cast of I Wish You Well (a musical about Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s ski trial), General Turgidson in Dr Strangelove, a would-be Sidney Poitier in Retrograde, and revivals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Grapes of Wrath, Guys & Dolls and A Streetcar Named Desire. Even the iceberg in Titanique is Black \u2014 and winning an Olivier for it.\u201cLondon has now become the Boston of American theatre, the space where the narrative gets to be explored and experimented on to try something new,\u201d says Jonathan McCrory, the artistic director of New York\u2019s National Black Theatre, citing Boston\u2019s history of incubation (of Hamilton, for one). \u201cThe pipeline is London to America.\u201dAcross London\u2019s Black theatre renaissance, one name resonates: James Baldwin, one of many 20th-century Black American artists who fled the US for Paris. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what was going to happen to me in France, but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York,\u201d he quipped. In the Baldwin model, is London now a fresh refuge for American or even global Blackness?Levingston sighs: \u201cBaldwin is a reminder that you can leave America but America can never leave you.\u201d Asked if he has considered life abroad, McCrory sighs too: \u201cI\u2019m trying to build my oasis here. I\u2019m trying to get out of the burning building, to stop being a firefighter and start being a gardener.\u201dBeyond the stage, there is the question of audiences. On Broadway, they are 71 per cent white, with theatregoers\u2019 household income on average $276,375. London\u2019s numbers are more elusive but the National Theatre\u2019s audience is 89 per cent white.And there is no shortage of British racism. Francesca Amewudah-Rivers received death threats last year for playing a Black Juliet opposite Tom Holland\u2019s Romeo. Kwame Kwei-Armah, former artistic director at the Young Vic, battled fundraising anxiety that his stages might become a \u201cBlack National Theatre\u201d. And last year\u2019s \u201cBlack Out\u201d nights favouring all-Black audiences roiled critics all the way to Downing Street.\u00a0But in London a progressive point of no return seems within reach. \u201cI really don\u2019t want to be having this same conversation in 10 years,\u201d says Linton. \u201cAnd I hope by then that the Oliviers have caught up to the Tonys in acknowledging Black talent.\u201dMeanwhile McCrory details the challenge of being strategically undervalued: \u201cThe system isn\u2019t broken. The system is working the ways it\u2019s been wanting to work. We fight a system calling it broken. But it\u2019s Broadway pushing up against its nature as a good ol\u2019 boys club. The question is: do we have the patience for that journey?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic West End attendance has increased 11 per cent over pre-pandemic levels while Broadway attendance has fallen 17 per cent. As they grapple with divergent new normals, the duelling theatre capitals offer a study in contrast on recent racial justice efforts.Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":302983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-302982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302982"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302984,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302982\/revisions\/302984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}