by Chrissy Iley
Tickets to see Denzel Washington on Broadway in A Raisin In The Sun are hard to come by. For the first time I used American Express to find me a ticket. I’ve been a member of this service for 20 years and never had to resort to it.
The show is the hit of the season, even President Obama and Michelle Obama took time out to see it.
Why is it so amazing? Simply because Denzel gives a rock star of a performance. He shrinks that theatre down so you think you’re in the living room with the younger family. You are taken right back to Chicago’s tough South Side in the late fifties.
It takes a lot for theatre to move me. I’m all about the magic of the movies. But somehow Denzel made this show cinematic, certainly magnetic. You can’t take your eyes off him.
Essentially the story of Raisin, written by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, is a bleak one. As we sat in the audience the poem from which the line A Raisin In The Sun is written huge and high on the curtain.
It talks about a life shrivelled, diminished. Yet somehow Denzel takes that life and that character Walter Lee Younger to an impressive insecure egomaniac that you just can’t resist. He is broke, he is depressed, his downtrodden wife – played by Sophie Okonedo – is miserable and unnoticeable.
His mother is waiting for an insurance cheque on their deceased hard working father’s life. It’s for $10,000. Walter is desperate to invest it with one of his ne’er do well friends in a liquor store. The formidable matriarch played mesmerisingly by Latanya Richardson Jackson loves God, hates liquor, and dreams of moving the family into a new home in suburbia, even white suburbia. Anything to get them out of their grim surroundings.
Walter’s sister Beneatha, is a student, has dreams of exploring life, moving beyond convention and becoming a doctor. She has a choice of what path to take represented by two boyfriends, one who is rich but conventional and doesn’t really understand her, and the encouraging, clever Nigerian who mocks her fake hair. When she hacks it off we see which way she’s going.
There are so many conflicts in the household, Denzel’s character straddling them all. After his mother has paid the deposit on the new house the white people send a representative to pay them not to move in. In the meantime Walter has ‘invested’ the rest of the money including Beneatha’s college fund in a scam. The money is all gone and it is heartbreaking. Because it is Denzel playing Walter you don’t hate him for this, you are heartbroken.
Some of these themes sound harsh, miserable, bleak, but the genius of Denzel is he delivers them deliciously, unstoppably, with such zeal you eat them all up excitedly. You laugh for much of it.
It showcases his greatness as an actor. The rest of the cast is mostly superb. Could do without Sophie Okonedo’s annoying Chicago accent and the slightly wrong footed pitch of over the top misery, but because of Denzel’s magic you’re prepared to sweep anything else aside.
Tickets cost possibly more than the flight to New York! But it’s a limited run and it’s spectacular. And if you’re only going to go to theatre once in your life this is the one to go to.
A Raisin In The Sun is at the Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street until June 15. For tickets visit telecharge.com.