Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman chatting about the Alliance Theatre’s August Wilson Full Circle, featuring both The Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf in repertory through Sept. 28.
Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.
Which is worth more, a bucket of nails or a multimillion-dollar development project? Watch the two plays of the Alliance Theatre’s August Wilson Full Circle, a theatrical event more than 20 years in the making, and you’ll discover they have equal value: Each may be precisely worth the life of an African-American man.
Full Circle stages the Atlanta debuts of the final two plays in playwright August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” of heavyweight dramas. Also called “the Pittsburgh Cycle,” Wilson’s landmark project consists of 10 plays, mostly set in Pittsburgh’s African-American Hill District, with each script representing a different decade of the 20th century.
The Gem of the Ocean, set in 1904, takes place in a house on Pittsburgh’s Wylie Street, and involves two men whose fates hinge on a seemingly trivial theft from an oppressive mill. In Radio Golf, ambitious developer Harmond Wilks sets his fortune on a 1997 land deal that will launch his mayoral campaign and revitalize the Hill District, unless questions over that same Wylie Street house demolish his plans.
The Gem of the Ocean/Radio Golf twofer, playing on alternate nights and featuring the same actors doubling up, would be must-see theater based on the strength of the shows alone. August Wilson Full Circle proves even bigger than the sum of its parts. It marks the beginning of the Alliance Theatre’s 40th anniversary season, caps off the late playwright’s epic decalogue of American theater, and provides a kind of personal culmination and homecoming for director Kenny Leon, former artistic director of the Alliance.
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(Photo by Greg Mooney)
I saw the Sunday matinee of True Colors Theatre Company’s The Amen Corner, but artistic director Kenny Leon was not there to introduce it with his typical effervescence. It had somehow escaped my attention that, Leon had been directing Flashdance: The Musical, which just opened at England’s Theatre Royal in Plymouth.
After an esteemed stint as the Alliance Theatre’s artistic director, Leon has become a director of Broadway and national stature, most recently with his Emmy-nominated TV movie of A Raisin in the Sun. He has certainly directed musicals in the past, but the genre never seemed like his first love, making him a surprising choice for the musicalization of the 1983 Jennifer Beals movie. Just imagine the costume budget for leg warmers in numbers like “She’s a Maniac.” If you need your Flashdance memory refreshed, here’s a clip of the final dance number, as interpreted by a Boba Fett action figure. (Be sure to watch it to the end.)
The only aesthetic connection that I see between Leon and Flashdance is so tenuous that it can’t possibly be correct, but here goes:
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