Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin: Still Just as Fresh 45 Years Later
Michael Feingold
Tuesday, April 20th 2004
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photo: Joan Marcus
Audra McDonald and Sean Combs
Details:
By Lorraine Hansberry
Royale Theatre
242 West 45th Street
212.239.6200
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This is especially startling given Raisin's celebrity-heavy cast, which makes Leon's achievement in getting them all into the life of the play especially impressive. There is no grandstanding or self-consciousness. Sean Combs as the frustrated hero, Walter Lee, is frankly a novice: He hasn't yet learned how to inhabit the role fully—his transitions are especially problematic—but he holds his place capably. He hardly needs to do more: Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald, as Walter Lee's mother and wife respectively, build performances so powerful (and so divested of both actresses' usual glamour) that everyone else is swept along with them. It's Rashad, not Combs, who gets—and deserves—the star call.
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