James Ijames Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Like that relative who picks through the chicken parts at a family picnic to find the leg or the breast or the thigh with just the right amount of crisp, playwright James Ijames has no reluctance to rummage through the bones of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to cook up the irresistible Fat Ham.

Mercury 

EXCLUSIVE: Longtime Industry Entertainment managers Adam Levine, Brandy Rivers and Michael Hepburn have left to start a new management/production company that they have named Amplified. The trio, who come from talent (Levine, Hepburn) and lit (Rivers) backgrounds, are bringing all of their clients to the new venture.

The critically acclaimed play Fat Ham won over audiences on Broadway last year and now the show is making its L.A. debut at the Geffen Playhouse.

Fat Ham, James Ijames relocates Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the kingdom of Denmark to a modern-day backyard in “North Carolina, or Virginia, or Maryland, or Tennessee.”The playwright infuses the tale with the culturally specific atmosphere of Black Americana — pork on the grill, brown liquor flowing, and Frankie Beverly singing “Before I Let Go” as a grown and sexy couple grooves to the music. But instead of a pondering prince, we have melancholy only-son Juicy (Marquis D.

Darren Aronofsky‘s Protozoa Pictures and Los Angeles Media Fund are launching a joint venture focused on commissioning and producing new live theater projects as well as co-producing and supporting larger productions.

EXCLUSIVE: Time has today unveiled Person of the Week, its first original podcast, hosted by Senior Correspondent Charlotte Alter, which will feature candid conversations weekly with the people shaping our world.

Fat Ham, James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy nominated for five Tony Awards, will add one week of performances to its Broadway run, producers announced today.

REFRESH FOR UDPATES: The nominations for the 76th Annual Tony Awards will be announced on CBS Mornings today by Funny Girl star Lea Michele and MJ‘s Tony Award winner Myles Frost. The complete list of nominations will be posted here at 9:10 a.m. ET./6 a.m. PT.

Sophia Scorziello editor Samuel Baum’s “The Engagement Party” and Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s “Every Brilliant Thing,” featuring Daniel K. Isaac, will launch a new season of shows at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. The productions are two of the seven announced as part of the upcoming lineup of performances at the Gil Cates and Audrey Skirball Kenis Theaters. The shows will run from Sept. 23, 2023 to July 14, 2024. This season of comedies and dramas will feature world premieres, West Coast premieres and one Los Angeles premiere. Up third is Selina Fillinger’s “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive,” a production about the backstage work of the women in charge of fixing a President’s nightmarish mistake.

Lupita Nyong’o and Sandra Oh lend their star power to opening night of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham at American Airlines Theatre on Wednesday (April 12) in New York City.

Naveen Kumar New York stages are rarely without some version of Shakespeare’s mopey Danish prince, tormented by fatal family drama. But none has ever been quite like the protagonist of “Fat Ham,” Juicy, who is described by the playwright James Ijames as “gloriously and beautifully soft in both body and temperament.” Something is rotten in Juicy’s world, which, like Hamlet’s, pulses with violence, desire and scrutiny over the nature of existence. But this is also a classic cookout, where bloodspill is generally limited to the slaughtered hog on the grill. Not to mention that “Fat Ham” is a total gas — the funniest and most invigorating new show on Broadway, where the acclaimed Public Theater production, co-produced with National Black Theatre, has opened after an Off Broadway run last year. Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, “Fat Ham” recasts its source material to imagine what Shakespeare did not — how people might overcome circumstances, expectations and their own demons to forge new paths through life. 

Angelique Jackson Tony, Emmy and Grammy-winner and Oscar-nominee Cynthia Erivo has joined the producing team of “Fat Ham” as the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy heads to Broadway. “Fat Ham” will begin performances on Tues., March 21, and officially open on Wed., April 12, at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway for a strictly limited 14-week engagement through Sun., June 25. “Almost 10 years ago, I was introduced to the Broadway community in a musical that shook my world and changed my life irrevocably,” Erivo said in a statement to Variety. “I have been waiting for the right opportunity to return to the theater community and am thrilled to be back, this time as a first-time producer with ‘Fat Ham.’”

Playwright James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Fat Ham, a take-off of Hamlet set at a Southern Black family’s cook-out, will make its Broadway debut this spring, beginning previews on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, at the American Airlines Theatre ahead of an official opening on Wednesday, April 12. The strictly limited 14-week engagement runs through Sunday, August 6.

Gordon Cox Theater EditorThe playwright James Ijames is no stranger to audacious choices. His adaptation of “Hamlet,” “Fat Ham,” sets the story at a backyard barbecue thrown by a Black family in the South — and reimagines the tragedy as a comedy.Now that “Fat Ham” has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, expect him to get even bolder.Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:“I feel like I want to take more risks now,” Ijames said on Stagecraft, Variety‘s theater podcast. “I want to be more adventurous.

NEW YORK -- Joshua Cohen's “The Netanyahus,” a comic and rigorous campus novel based on the true story of the father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeking a job in academia, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012, was a medieval historian and ultra-nationalist who taught at several American schools, including the University of Denver and Cornell University. “The Netanyahus” is set around 1959-60 and centers on a Jewish historian at a university loosely based on Cornell who is asked to help decide whether to hire the visiting Israeli scholar.

Fat Ham, playwright James Ijames’ comedy-drama reinvention of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama today, just days before the acclaimed play is to make its New York debut at the Public Theater Off Broadway.

Kill Move Paradise by James Ijames*—a '* critic pick—and it transformed our space. James wrote this gorgeous play— about those boys humanity and what happens to their soul after it's ripped from like this earthly plane and that they're still just boys but in Purgatory. Folks don't often hear the narrative around these atrocities.