Not only singing, but also dancing. Staring from countless black-and-white images, the dignified figure moves to the beat of a score by Nashville-based country music composer Marcus Hummon. “Of course he danced!” Declared Charles Randolph, the director and co-author of the musical. “That is, he met his wife in a dance. He was fascinated by everything. He learned the violin later in his life. He has an unstoppable heart, his curious heart. Had. “
The long-running show, postponed by the closure of the pandemic, is one of the arena’s efforts to embrace important American history in popular culture. This genre, of course, is gaining momentum for Hamilton’s Jaguar Note performance. (Officially opening at the Arena’s Krieger Theater on July 28.) Other shows featuring only female, non-binary, and transgender actors, such as the “1776” revival on Broadway, have our roots. I’m trying to rebuild. A national story. The “American Prophet” sets a new stage for understanding how we have sometimes sought to become a more equitable country.
Arena companies boast a presumable pedigree. Hamon and Randolph Wright, directors of the recent Tony-nominated revival of Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind, chose to adapt Douglas’s vast language to about four-fifths of their script. .. If it wasn’t credible enough, they relied on Douglas’ great great maternal grandson, Kenneth B. Morris Jr., for guidance. As a result, Morris became the project’s “Douglas Family Consultant.”
“We wanted to humanize him because he was on this pedestal as this iconic figure in history,” Morris said in an interview with Zoom. Douglas’ fame and advocacy scale and strength were astounding, not only in terms of ending slavery, but also in education, voting rights and women’s equality. “I know I’m in my family and working with scholars who studied my family,” Morris added. “The story about him who humanizes him is just wonderful.”
Douglas’s amazing life and achievement story — a campaign for escape and liberation from slavery, his career as a politician and publisher, his unparalleled chapel — in a few hours of commentary and singing. It’s hard to imagine how it will be compressed. This seems to have happened to the creative team as well. They decided to focus on the events of his biography leading up to the Civil War. It was a time when Randolph Wright called Douglas “the Badas era, the activist era, the rebellion era, the 40s, when he became an American.” Prophet. “
For Grammy-winning songwriter Hamon, who composed for Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd, The Chicks and others, Douglas’ own composition propelled the show’s melody and paved the way for his creativity. I noticed that. “It was ultimately the poetry of his language that I started listening to music,” Humon explained. “If you say,’You need fire, not light. It’s lightning, not a gentle shower.” That is, it’s poetry. Sometimes his speeches and writings simply change gears into poetry. “
After reading one of his three autobiographies at a church in Nashville in the mid-2010s, Hamon embarked on a small song cycle about Douglas. “It was great, I enjoyed it, but I kept reading, and when I arrived at Life and Times [of Frederick Douglass]I thought. “Well, there’s a huge story here,” Humon said. “I don’t know. I didn’t fully understand it. And maybe I haven’t done that yet, I’m still trying, but I knew I needed help. I needed a writer / director to work with, and I had a friend who said, “Yes, we know who the man is.” “
The man was Randall Flight, a seasoned director of the arena (Rinnottage’s “Ruins”), which includes the show “Motown” built around Impresario’s Berry Gordy’s work on Broadway’s musical theater project. .. Randolph Wright wasn’t sure if another slice of the towering character’s drama would be appropriate, as he was also developing material for his work on actor Sidney Poitier.
“My immediate response was:’Hmm’,” he said, mimicking fatigue. However, he traveled to Nashville to visit his family and sat down to meet Hamon and listened to his music. “And the first song went through my body,” the director added.
A network of interrelated friendships also brought Morris’ participation. Morris, along with her mother, Netty Washington Douglass, founded the Frederick Douglass Family Initiative in 2007, an organization that raises awareness of racism and trafficking. He attended a 2019 reading of the musical at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he met Randall Flight. “We’ve become best friends-we’re brothers now-and I’ve officially arrived as a legacy consultant for the project,” Morris said. Some of the advice he gave has become central to the enterprise.
“I told Marcus and Charles early on that my great-grandmother Anna had to be portrayed and treated with the dignity and respect she deserved, and she was in history. I haven’t received it. “
Anna Douglas, Frederick’s first wife, embodied by Cristolin Lloyd, a former cast member of “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway in the arena, has been promoted to a co-starring role. “She was a radical freedom fighter in her own right,” said Morris, whose illustrious ancestors did not end in Douglas. He is also the great-grandson of Booker T. Washington. “Anna and Frederick have been married for 44 years. They had five children. They had 21 grandchildren. And she was a very important part of this.” (Douglas remarried after Anna’s death in 1882.)
A musical that may expand Douglas’s perch with popular imagination is both an emotional mission for Morris and a proper amplification of his legacy. Douglas said he understands the value of imprinting the cause with a relevant and humane identity. This is one of the reasons he was a very active early supporter of photography. In fact, the filmmaker suggested to Morris a while back that Douglas was the “inventor of selfies.”
“He was talking about selfies, not as this frivolous thing people do, but by presenting themselves and putting themselves there in the way people want them to see,” Morris said. rice field. “So you are forming your own identity. And he wasn’t taking his first picture, but he put himself there in the way you want to be seen and of general consciousness I came up with the idea of putting it inside. “
It is now Randolph Wright and Hamon who have a say in how Douglas is seen and heard. And yes, even how he dances.
American prophet, Music and lyrics by Marcus Hummon, Book by Hamon and Charles Randolph Wright. A film directed by Randle Flight. Arena stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW until August 28th. 202-488-3300. arenastage.org.
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