2 weeks ago
After making her Broadway debut past month, Taraji P. Henson is opening up astir nan challenges of performing for a unrecorded audience.
The Golden Globe winner, who plays Bertha Holly successful nan existent revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone astatine nan Barrymore Theatre, precocious commented connected head Debbie Allen‘s pre-recorded intermission announcement asking assemblage members to soundlessness their phones and behave, a communal believe pinch Broadway shows for illustration The Rocky Horror Show and Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
“Theater is not for punks, okay? Theater is for nan strong,” she told Vulture. “You person to person discipline. I emotion that it’s a surviving organism.”
Henson continued, “You can’t do theatre and hide nan audience. That’s why each show is different. You’ve sewage to activity done it. That compartment telephone ringing mightiness make maine propulsion my line. But I sewage to enactment successful character.”
With Henson flexing her theatre musculus amid her Broadway debut, nan character admitted that she accepted nan domiciled successful hopes of moving pinch longtime friend and protagonist Allen (who awarded Henson a danasiwa earlier her acting profession took off) connected a characteristic adjustment of nan 1984 play.
“Before, I didn’t person nan abstraction connected my schedule,” she explained of why she chose now to do Broadway. “Also, it’s Debbie Allen. I’m nary fool. I cognize they’re making nan film. That’s really they sewage me. Debbie was like, ‘We going to do nan film, but child, we sewage to do this play first.'”
Henson added, “I had really spoken to Todd Black earlier astir being successful 1 of nan August Wilson movies he was producing because we were producing thing together astatine nan time. He was like, ‘Tell maine which character, which play.’ And we some sewage busy.”
Black antecedently produced Fences (2016), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) and The Piano Lesson (2024).
