Alvin Ailey: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Electromagnetic Productions, the company set up by 300 and The Spiderwick Chronicles producer Mark Kimsey and former MGM boss Roger Birnbaum who produced films including The Sixth Sense and Rush Hour, is moving into non-scripted television.

American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words (★★★☆☆), in its world-premiere production at Arena Stage, wisely draw directly from the source for their expansive, though not exhaustive, biography of the great abolitionist, author, publisher, statesman, escaped slave, and public speaker.The bulk of Douglass’ lines and lyrics in the show are words that the man either spoke or wrote, interpreted and interpolated fluidly by book writers Charles Randolph-Wright and Marcus Hummon.Randolph-Wright also directs, while Grammy-winner Hummon composed music and lyrics for the score, which floats between R&B, pop, and gospel influences, but stays too comfortably within theater conventions.The music doesn’t start down the most adventurous path. Opening with Douglass plaintively singing “What Does Freedom Look Like?” feels way too obvious.The follow-up number, “Going to the Great House,” turns out to be a sharply satirical subversion of happy-dancing-slave tropes, but then shifts into a sober — and, again, very on-the-nose — “Wade in the Water,” complete with choreography reminiscent of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.”Fortunately, the show goes bolder in its characterization of Frederick Douglass.

EXCLUSIVE: Stax Records, the label responsible for hits such as Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay and Sam & Dave’s Soul Man, is getting the docuseries treatment.

Neon said Wednesday that it has come aboard Fire of Love, Sara Dosa’s documentary that world premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. That’s where Deadline boke the news that National Geographic Documentary Films acquired worldwide rights to the pic, which explores the lives and work of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft through rare archival footage.

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATERThe acclaimed modern dance company, founded more than 60 years ago, has been an integral part of programming at the Kennedy Center from the very start, performing at the arts complex’s formal opening ceremony in 1971. This year, the company returns to celebrate the center’s 50th anniversary with a week-long run of performances in the Opera House.Per tradition, every performance ends with Revelations, the signature masterpiece Ailey created in tribute to his African-American heritage, drawing inspiration from childhood memories of growing up in the Black church in Texas as well as from the writings of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.

Alvin Ailey, which opens in New York on Friday — greatness recognizes greatness when Cicely Tyson calls him “the Pied Piper of modern dance” at his 1988 Kennedy Center Honors induction.And for this master of movement — who founded the internationally renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company in New York in 1958 — it was all about bringing black people to the traditionally white world of dance.“I wanted it to be the kind of dancing that could be done for the man on the street, for the people,” Ailey says in audio recordings of interviews conducted from 1988 to 1989, when he died from AIDS-related complications at 58.