CAN I GET AN AMEN!
It’s also a showcase for the talents of Leon Brown, a triple-threat dancer, singer, and actor in such Ensemble shows as Muddy Waters (The Hoochie Coochie Man), Anna Lucasta, and The Other Cinderella. Exuding a contagious confidence, Brown is a smooth artist with a cunning smile and piercing eyes. As cool as Brown plays things onstage, he can also turn up the heat on a poem or song. On top of this, he dances: copying the undulating arms and joyous stretches of Alvin Ailey, Brown performs his own choreography to Quincy Jones’s score from Roots and a vocal solo from The Gospel at Colonus.
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Brown contributes some of his own poetry, including a sardonic spoof of a venal, opportunistic slave overseer, the rhapsodic escape fantasies of a troubled child (which Brown also dances to Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”), and an appeal that seems to come from the children themselves (the refrain is “the loudest scream you will never hear”). Brown pursues the theme of children in crisis in his elegiac “Papa,” performed by 17-year-old Kareem Dale, a boy’s remembrance of the proud father whose sole legacy was pride.
