2012 season
| It Can't Happen Here | Rain Pryor - Fried Chicken & Latkes | Mikhail Horowitz & Gilles Malkine |
| Music & Cabaret | First Looks at The Fringe| Goat Hill Poets
| Music & Cabaret | First Looks at The Fringe| Goat Hill Poets
Rain Pryor - Fried Chicken and Latkes
Aug 24, 25, 31, Sept 1 at 8pm
Rain Pryor
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Fried Chicken And Latkes is Rain Pryor's funny, poignant, brilliant and NAACP award winning one-person play, based on Rain's life. It’s an irreverent and poignant look at racism in the late 60’s early 70’s. Rain completely wrote and created her show, including adding some of her own original music and lyrics to the production. She was a Los Angeles Times "Critics Choice" and her singing voice and sense of timing were hailed as rare gifts. This show has earned rave reviews, from the US and UK, and has consistently played to sold out crowds and standing ovations. She is the Artistic Director of the Strand Theatre in Baltimore, in addition to being a gifted Writer, Director, Actor and Stand-Up Comedian.
Rain Pryor, on her journey and her performance: "Because I'm standing on my own two feet and I have become Rain, I am comfortable with being a Pryor," she says. "I feel it's my right, it's my legacy. What I'm doing up there on that stage is the real tribute. "I'm black and a Jew! Shalom, my brothers! Oy vey!" ...(CBS Feb 2009) |
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Theater Review Published: August 14, 2012
Instead of a Bedtime Story, a Lullaby From Miles Davis ‘Fried Chicken and Latkes,’ a Rain Pryor Solo Show By ANDY WEBSTER |
Make no mistake: Rain Pryor, the star of the autobiographical solo show “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” is not just defined by her father, the comedian Richard Pryor. She most definitely is her own woman. But she sure does one hell of an impersonation of her dad.
There are many dimensions to this robust, ebullient performer, all evident in this trim production, which sails by in an effervescent 70 minutes. The daughter of Pryor (“a comic genius”) and a Jewish onetime go-go dancer, Ms. Pryor was raised in Beverly Hills, Calif., in a biracial household. Her show is a parade of friends, relatives and tormentors, in which she also sings — with impressive power — accompanied by a skilled jazz trio led by Charles Lindberg.
Her portraits include those of a slur-hurling elementary school antagonist; her hardheaded mother (“Joan Crawford in the ’hood”); her maternal grandmother and sagacious paternal great-grandmother; a tough black female classmate; a vapid 1980s Valley girl; and Miles Davis (who once serenaded her to sleep).
And she delivers a spot-on impression of her father, both at his height (she summons bits of his routine about shooting at his wife’s car) and, poignantly, in his decline (when he suffered from the multiple sclerosis that claimed his life in 2005). She acknowledges his flaws, like womanizing and drug abuse, but vividly renders his tender paternal concern and honorable candor.
Ms. Pryor has had many television roles, perhaps most notably as a regular character on the ABC series “Head of the Class.” But she has an outsize presence built for Broadway; at times her salty banter suggests Bette Midler without the camp. Now a mother, she abandoned “Hollyweird” (her term) to adopt Baltimore as a base of operations. But she certainly seems right at home in Manhattan.
There are many dimensions to this robust, ebullient performer, all evident in this trim production, which sails by in an effervescent 70 minutes. The daughter of Pryor (“a comic genius”) and a Jewish onetime go-go dancer, Ms. Pryor was raised in Beverly Hills, Calif., in a biracial household. Her show is a parade of friends, relatives and tormentors, in which she also sings — with impressive power — accompanied by a skilled jazz trio led by Charles Lindberg.
Her portraits include those of a slur-hurling elementary school antagonist; her hardheaded mother (“Joan Crawford in the ’hood”); her maternal grandmother and sagacious paternal great-grandmother; a tough black female classmate; a vapid 1980s Valley girl; and Miles Davis (who once serenaded her to sleep).
And she delivers a spot-on impression of her father, both at his height (she summons bits of his routine about shooting at his wife’s car) and, poignantly, in his decline (when he suffered from the multiple sclerosis that claimed his life in 2005). She acknowledges his flaws, like womanizing and drug abuse, but vividly renders his tender paternal concern and honorable candor.
Ms. Pryor has had many television roles, perhaps most notably as a regular character on the ABC series “Head of the Class.” But she has an outsize presence built for Broadway; at times her salty banter suggests Bette Midler without the camp. Now a mother, she abandoned “Hollyweird” (her term) to adopt Baltimore as a base of operations. But she certainly seems right at home in Manhattan.