Funny Girl is the beloved, fictionalized story of Fanny Brice, a comedic actress who rose to fame performing with the Ziegfield’s Follies revue. Brice was married and divorced three times in her life, notably to Nick Arnstein, a convicted conman whose trial was front page news at the time. Her rise in the entertainment industry and […]
Ask anyone born before the year 2000 and they probably have a distinct memory of Michael Jackson’s music. I can remember family road trips from Atlanta to Chicago where we plugged a boombox into our minivan’s cigarette lighter and played Jackson 5 cassette tapes, singing at the top of our lungs all the way through […]
When performer and playwright Brian Quijada was in the third grade, his teacher taught the class a lesson about the Civil Rights Movement during Black History Month. She explained that a woman named Rosa Parks changed the course of history by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Quijada raised his hand […]
The prolific novelist, Toni Morrison, wrote in her book Beloved, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Though Morrison was writing about enslaved people escaping from a plantation, her words aptly describe rock ’n’ roll legend Tina Turner’s life journey. During her life, Tina never shied away from sharing […]
One of the most quoted sentences from Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple is “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Walker grew up in Eatonton, Georgia in the 1940s, the youngest of eight children in a sharecropping family. It is […]
Richard Thomas, who plays Atticus, and Jacqueline Williams, who plays Calpurnia, discuss playing two of the most beloved characters from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In Harper Lee’s celebrated novel To Kill a Mockingbird she wrote, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” When the book was published […]