Alex Newell performs ‘Home’ on the 2023 TCG Gala. (Photo by Andy Henderson)
NEW YORK CITY: There was a lot love within the room, it felt like an early Valentine’s Day on the Edison Hotel Ballroom on Monday, Jan. 9, the place “Our Stories,” the 2023 gala of Theatre Communications Group, which publishes American Theatre, was held. The occasion not solely raised a document $300,000 for the theatre assist group but in addition served as a form of homecoming for theatre of us who’ve spent a lot time aside these previous few years. The group’s final in-person gala was held in 2020, simply earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic altered the world as we knew it, when it honored playwright David Henry Hwang and the National Black Theatre Festival. TCG then hosted a digital, pre-recorded gala ceremony honoring Ricardo Khan and the Performing Arts Alliance again in 2021, which additionally marked the group’s sixtieth anniversary.
The 2023 Our Stories Gala was introduced in honor of Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson, in recognition of their contributions to the theatre area and their dedication to preserving the legacy of August Wilson. Just throughout the road from the Edison on the Barrymore Theatre is the hit revival of Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, which Richardson Jackson directed and by which her husband Jackson is presently performing.
The occasion’s lineup of jazz-infused love songs, directed by Jerry Dixon, kicked off with a efficiency by Sidney DuPont, a Tony nominee for Paradise Square, who served up a steaming scorching rendition of Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man That Got Away,” with a facet of Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” accompanied by Dionne Hendricks on the ivories. As is the case with the most effective form of consolation meals, the gang was hungry for extra, and the sentimental set record appeared like a becoming tribute to such a dynamic energy couple as Sam and LaTanya.
The gala’s co-chairs—lead Piano Lesson producer Brian Anthony Moreland and Rick Miramontez, president of the Broadway publicity agency DKC/O&M—provided opening remarks. Noting that it’s “easy to get a crowd to turn out for LaTanya and Samuel L. Jackson,” they celebrated The Piano Lesson’s success as each this season’s highest-grossing play revival and August Wilson’s highest-grossing Broadway title up to now.
TCG govt director and CEO Teresa Eyring then spoke, marking the Monday as momentous not solely as a result of it featured the corporate’s first in-person gala in three years, but in addition its first in-office board assembly earlier that day since early 2020. From its humble beginnings supporting a handful of theatres in 1961, TCG has grown, as Eyring described it, right into a nationwide group that now serves greater than 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and over 7,000 Individual Members. Even amid and after the sector’s current years of challenges, “We never gave up on theatre,” she stated.
TCG isn’t the one group that has tended the flame of arts assist, Eyring famous. With the assistance of Congress’s year-end funding deal, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities will each obtain $27 million will increase for an FY23 finances of $207 million every. In addition, the U.S. Department of Education’s Title-IV funding, which has been used to assist arts schooling, will obtain $1.38 billion, a rise of $100 million over its present allocation, whereas the Arts in Education program fund will obtain a continued funding degree of $36.5 million.
The gala additionally supplied a chance to assist TCG’s One Million Books Campaign, which goals to make much more of the performs TCG publishes accessible to readers in colleges, universities, public libraries, impartial bookstores, and past. As North America’s largest impartial commerce writer of dramatic literature, TCG Books is answerable for canonizing the printed works of such playwrights as Tony Kushner, Dominique Morriseau, Lynn Nottage, and Paula Vogel, together with the publication of August Wilson’s total American Century Cycle assortment.
With an introduction by Vanessa Williams, honoree LaTanya Richardson Jackson accepted the gala award on her personal behalf in addition to her husband’s. She emphasised that making theatre requires teamwork, saying, “It’s a collaboration from the front door to the back door to the basement downstairs,” and, with an appreciative nod to TCG’s One Million Books Campaign, inspired gala attendees to “bring your masks across the street to the Barrymore to see The Piano Lesson before all the books are banned.” Samuel L. Jackson was current for a photograph alternative however not for the ceremony itself, as a result of COVID precautions necessitated by his position within the Piano Lesson‘s ongoing run. The Jacksons confirmed up in one other approach: They made a $25,000 donation to TCG.
Though the presentation of an enormous examine is inevitably a troublesome act to comply with, Hadestown’s Lillias White positively stuffed the home together with her renditions a la Betty Carter of “The Man I Love” and “Love Dance,” accompanied by the impassioned jazz stylings of Mathis Picard on piano. White’s sequin floral jacket was a theatrical second in itself.
This efficiency then gave approach to a heartfelt acknowledgment of the One Million Books Campaign, introduced by Nikkole Salter, TCG board chair and division chair of theatre arts for Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, and Keith Arthur Bolden, actor and affiliate professor of theatre and efficiency at Spelman College. Each spoke concerning the great studying alternative supplied by a library outfitted with works by various playwrights. From the duty of discovering a monologue that places authenticity immediately on the web page to the enjoyment of connecting with a scene on a private degree, a extensively stocked library permits college students to check the total extent of the huge and assorted area of theatre.
Bolden additional expressed gratitude for the honorees’ continued assist for the nation’s HBCUs, which stretches again to the Seventies, when Richardson Jackson and Jackson each carried out with the Morehouse Spelman Players on Spelman’s stage. The couple has additionally made a $5 million donation to fund the renovation of Spelman’s John D. Rockefeller Fine Arts Building, which can home the LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center.
The festivities continued with the fundraising and silent public sale parts of the night, hosted by TCG board member Harold Steward, govt director and cultural strategist for Boston’s The Theatre Offensive and self-proclaimed intercourse siren (he had heels to indicate for it). Gala attendees had the chance to bid for a whole assortment of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, with 5 undisclosed copies signed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson. The book-bidding, together with Text-to-Give donations, garnered a complete of in-room fundraising that exceeded $50,000.
Alex Newell, forged member of the brand new musical Shucked, gave the ultimate efficiency of the night time, and, accompanied by Dionne Hendricks, introduced us “Home.” An apt alternative, given The Wiz revival slated for 2024. Can’t you’re feeling a model new day?
Alli Pierson (she/her) is affiliate editor of American Theatre. apierson@tcg.org
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