Capitol Area Performers

10/07/2019

Food for thought...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/opinion/slave-play-broadway.html

Experiencing Jeremy O. Harris’s provocative Broadway debut feels fraught, but invigorating.

10/23/2018

If you're in The Lansing area please check out The Riverwalk Theatre's Production of August Wilson's Jitney-Directed by Vanessa Cunningham Sanders Starring Guy Thomas Janell Hall Claudia Allen -Stage Manager Hair by- Desinthia Turnley Barry African American Theatre and Arts!

10/09/2018

Coming soon to the Lansing Area...

Ticket's went on sale Today Oct 2nd. Please Come out and support CAP and other Local Talent for Fall Production of the Play "Jitney" Director- Vanessa Cunningham Sanders Dates will be Thursday Oct 18th - Oct 21st and Oct 25th - Oct 28th. Riverwalk Theatre P.O. Box 12249 Lansing, MI near to impression 5. For more information call 517 - 482 - 5700. Or email at rwt@Riverwalk Theatre.com. This could be a nice Date Night, Family Outing, Ladies Night Out, or Fella's Night Out!

the writer of "Fences" Mr. August Wilson.
times Thurs 7pm, Fri/Sat 8pm , Sun 2pm

01/13/2018

08/17/2017

Appeared in previous productions.

08/17/2017

Break a leg my sister.

06/20/2017

looking for an actor ...male 20-30. One who can sing the blues would be a plus. Show goes up in Sept. Any suggestions?
Leave contact info here. Thanks.

05/25/2016

National black Theatre Festival Winston-Salem North Carolina

05/13/2016

10/18/2015

Please come out and support CAP'S own Vanessa Cunningham Sanders... 10th Annual Conference
BRS
Black Religion & Spirituality in the 21st Century

A Focus on Social Justice and Sacred Music:
Challenges and Opportunities!

October 18, 2015
B 122 Wells Hall, MSU
October 19, 20, & 21, 2015
Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center
55 South Harrison Road
East Lansing, MI 48824

Welcome


Dr. Gloria Stephens Smith
Conference Co-Chairperson

e

Dr. Lee June
Conference Co-Chairperson

2015 Conference Planning Committee
Dr. Gloria Stephens Smith, Conference Co-Chairperson
Dr. Lee June, Conference Co-Chairperson *Dr. Bayyinah Jeffries *Dr. Geneva Smitherman
Rev. Dr. Hilton Thomas *Shirley June *Dr. Denise Troutman
*Rev. Walter Gibson, Pastor, Pilgrim Rest *Rev. Sean Holland, Pastor, Epicenter of Worship *Rev. Russell McReynolds, Retired Pastor, United Methodist Church

Event Sponsors
Michigan State University African American & African Studies (AAAS), Student Affairs and Services, University Outreach and Engagement, College of Education, and Honors College

****LUNCH ON YOUR OWN****

Acknowledgements
Closing Remarks: Dr. Gloria Stephens Smith
BRS Co-Chairperson, Professor Emerita (MSU)

09/19/2014

CAP is looking to cast 2-3 female vocalists for an upcoming production. Reply here, if interested. God bless.

04/28/2014

CAP's own Vanessa C. Sanders will be a featured soloist. Please come out to support?

04/28/2014

CAP's own Vanessa C. Sanders will be a featured Soloist tonight. Please come out and support?

03/07/2013

This is something you all may want to check out in the Detroit Area....

The event titled Harriet’s Return: The Play starts on Sat, Mar 09!

02/21/2013

RIP to Lou Meyers, known for his role as Mr. Vernon Gaines on "A Different World" & these other roles : http://bet.us/YHB2BL

An autopsy has been scheduled to ascertain the official cause of death. He was 77.

Thank you for the laughs, Mr Meyers.

Here's the latest on the TV alum from Hillman College.

02/21/2013

On Feb 20, 86 years ago, Actor and Director Sidney Poitier was born in Miami, Florida. He arrived two and a half months prematurely while his Bahamian parents were on vacation in Miami. As soon as he was strong enough, Poitier left the United States with his parents for the Bahamas. There Poitier spent his early years on his father's tomato farm on Cat Island. After the farm failed, the family moved to Nassau when Poitier was around the age of 10.

In Nassau, Poitier seemed to have a knack for getting himself into trouble. His father decided to send the teenager to the United States for his own good. Poitier went to live with a brother when he was in his mid-teens. In New York City, he first worked menial jobs, such as dishwashing, to support himself before he found his life's passion.

Poitier made a deal with the American Negro Theater in New York City to receive acting lessons in exchange for working as a janitor for the theater. He eventually made his way to the ANT stage, filling in for Harry Belafonte in their production of Days of Our Youth. In 1946, Poitier appeared in a Broadway production of Lysistrata to great acclaim. For years, Poitier worked as a stage actor. He made his Hollywood debut in 1950 in No Way Out. He also appeared in Cry, the Beloved Country, a drama set in South Africa during the time of apartheid.

Cast mainly in supporting roles, Poitier had a career breakthrough with Blackboard Jungle (1955). He scored his first Academy Award nomination for the 1958 crime drama The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis. The following year, Poitier lit up the screen as a leading man in the musical Porgy and Bess, co-starring with Dorothy Dandridge. This film and his impressive turn in 1961's A Raisin in the Sun helped make a top star.

In 1964, Poitier won an Academy Award (best actor) for his performance in Lilies of the Field (1963)—marking the first Oscar win by an African-American actor. This accolade helped make
Poitier cinema's first Caribbean-American superstar, one who consciously defied racial stereotyping.

Sidney Poitier gave two very different yet equally strong performances in 1967. He played Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs in the Southern crime drama “In the Heat of the Night”, and in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, he played a black man engaged to a white woman in this groundbreaking look at in*******al marriage. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play his fiancée's parents in the film.

Poitier teamed up with friend Harry Belafonte for the Black Western “Buck and the Preacher” in 1972, which also marked Poitier's directorial debut. The pair appeared in the comedy “Uptown Saturday Night” and with Bill Cosby in 1974. In the same year, Poitier was appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire, which entitles him to use the title "Sir," though he chooses not to do so.

In 1980, Poitier directed the successful Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy “Stir Crazy”.

After roughly 10-year absence from the big screen as an actor, Poitier returned with a pair of dramas in 1988—Shoot to Kill and Little Nikita. Other notable later films include Sneakers (1992) and One Man, One Vote (1997). On the small screen, Poitier earned accolades for portraying some of history's famous men. He played U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in Separate but Equal in 1991 and South African leader Nelson Mandela in Mandela and De Klerk in 1997.

Retired from acting, Poitier has turned his attention to sharing his many personal experiences. He penned The Measure of a Man, which was billed as a spiritual autobiography and published in 2000. That same year, Poitier picked up a Grammy Award for best spoken word album for the audio version of the book. He shared his years of wisdom for future generations with 2008's Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter.

Poitier has received numerous honors during his legendary career; including serving as a non-resident Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In 2009, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Poitier was also feted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2011, earning the organization's Chaplin Lifetime Achievement Award.

09/22/2012

Interesting Fact... In 1963, the gifted Bahamian-born actor Sidney Poitier won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Lilies of the Field. It was a breakthrough moment in American media: Hollywood bestowing its highest honor on an actor of African descent who embodied intelligence, decency, honor, and personal initiative.

FAQs
What kind of reactions did Oscar Micheaux's films provoke? If the trailblazing filmmaker set out to attract controversy, he often succeeded; religious leaders in Chicago, for instance, attempted to cancel showings of Within Our Gates in 1920. Many feared that the film would stir up racial violence of the kind the city had endured during the riots of 1919.

In the five decades before that breakthrough, however, racist stereotypes abounded in mainstream American media, with portrayals of servants, maids, and other subservient types prevailing, and with broad, unflattering generalizations about the sexuality, intelligence, and work ethic of African-Americans as a whole quite common.



Read more on FamilyEducation: http://school.familyeducation.com/african-american-history/film/47073.html

African-American filmmakers pushed the envelope by using their movies as a social and political commentary on American society.

07/27/2012

What a great representation of the arts!!!! http://youtu.be/Znbpxk6Sq0g

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater - The Hunt - SYTYCD 9 (Top 16)....As Seen On ©Fox Wed at 8/7c, All Rights Reserved. SYTYCD Website: http://www.fox.com/dan...

05/24/2012

Did you know African American Actor/Pioneer-Louis Gossett Jr..... Although he was picked to play for the New York Knicks, Louis Gossett Jr. decided instead to pursue an acting career, making his Broadway debut in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. -Courtesy of http://www.biography.com/people/louis-gossett-jr-212163

Explore the decades-long career of actor Louis Gossett Jr., Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe winner, on Biography.com.

05/21/2012

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150991157172275&set=a.215379097274.167777.10764587274&type=1&theater We must maintain a strong presence of the Arts in our Communities!

URBAN FOLK DANCE is characterized by a seamless blend of expressive theatricality and heart-stopping athleticism, Ulysses Dove's choreography brilliantly captures the raw complexity of modern relationships. The Ailey company performs it tonight in Charlotte, NC.

Hope Boykin and Vernard Gilmore in Urban Folk Dance. Photo by Andrew Eccles

05/21/2012

Congratulations Lanette! Lanette is very talented and has been an actress in some of CAPS previous shows. http://youtu.be/CKH2n_ojbrs

05/18/2012

Rich and colorful history we have!

Richard Wright, photographed in his New York study by Gordon Parks, May 1943

Wright, a Natchez, Mississippi native, became a French citizen in 1947. He told a friend that “any black man remaining in the United States after the age of thirty-five was bound to kill, be killed, or go insane.”

Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960

05/17/2012

Let's all keep Pastor Marvin L. Winans in prayer in lieu of the attack today! I just hear from old church family that his finger was broken during the incident. http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/detroit/pastor-marvin-winans-carjacked-and-robbed-in-detroit

7 Action News has learned that Pastor Marvin Winans has been robbed and carjacked at a Detroit gas station.

11/09/2010

"FENCES" BY AUGUST WILSON IS JUST ONE OF THE MR. WILSON'S PHENOMINAL WORKS. JAMES EARL JONES AND MARY ALICE, WHO PLAYED TRIY AND RSISE IN THE 1985 PRODUCTION TALK ABOUT THE CATHARTIC EFFECT THAT ACTING IN FENCES HAD ON THEM. DENZEL WASHINGTON, WHO HAS DONE MUCH WORK ON THE THEATER STAGE WON HIS VERY FIRST TONY AWARD FOR THIS YEARS PRODUCTION OF FENCES ON BROADWAY AND HIS VIOLA DAVIS WON HER SECOND.

10/29/2010

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. Oscar Wilde

08/05/2010

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. ~James Matthew BarrieThe life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. ~James Matthew BarrieThe life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. ~James Matthew Barrie

07/24/2010

Show's for "Fences" are Sat. 2 pm "Matinee", and 7 pm evening! at the Hannah Community Center, 819 Abbott Road, East Lansing, MI. Tickets are $20 general seating. Doors open a half hour before show time, and we will begin promptly ON TIME!

07/20/2010

The Harlem Renaissance...
.. also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Voices of protest and ideological promotion of civil rights for African Americans inspired and created institutions and leaders who served as mentors to aspiring writers. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.”

Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance, which helped create the NAACP with the civil rights movement contributions of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois

07/16/2010

Today in Black History for July 16th...

1991 - Musician Miles Davis receives awardIn Paris, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was named a Knight in the (French) Legion of Honor, one of that nation's highest cultural honors.

07/13/2010

Cast Pics and such

07/13/2010

SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT...
Wilson's singular achievement and literary legacy is a cycle of ten plays�two of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama�dubbed "The Pittsburgh Cycle". Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience in the 20th century. "This cycle," notes the theater critic Christopher Rawson, "is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size, and cohesion." -Quote about the author of our upcoming production of "Fences" courtesy of AALBC.COM. Follow the link to view the full article.

August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel
to Daisy Wilson, an African American whose parents came from North
Carolina, and Frederick Kittel, a red-haired baker who emigrated from
Bohemia, Germany at 10.

07/13/2010

CAP is making moves, in the Capital City providing quality entertainment!

07/13/2010

Our goal is to make this Community Page the BEST! We would like to see it grow as a forum for keeping everyone posted on our upcoming events in the community, and make it a collection of shared knowledge and information about community arts in general.