MARK KENNEDY, Associated Press

4 hours ago

FILE – Wayne Brady attends the Paramount 2022 Upfront Party in New York on May 18, 2022. Brady and Alan Mingo Jr. will perform as Wiz in San Francisco from January 16 through February. 11 at the Golden Gate Theater and in Los Angeles from February 13 to March 3 before hitting Broadway in spring 2024. (Photo by Christopher Smith/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) – Two men who slipped on six-inch heels for Broadway’s “Kinky Boots” will play the title character behind the curtain when “The Wiz” tours the United States beginning this fall and hitting Broadway in 2024 — Wayne Brady and Alan Mingo Jr.

“Me and Wayne are going back as actors to where we were friends, Los Angeles,” says Minho. “So what better way to share a gig with your friends?” Brady adds, “It’s a dream. It really is a dream.”

Brady will perform as Wiz in San Francisco from January 16th to February. 11 at the Golden Gate Theater and in Los Angeles from February 13 to March 3 before hitting Broadway in spring 2024.

Mingo will play the Wiz in the remaining cities of the national tour beginning with the start in Baltimore and including Cleveland; Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta; Greenville, South Carolina; Chicago; Des Moines, Iowa; Tempe, Arizona and San Diego.

Most recently, the two actors appeared on Broadway in Kinky Boots, where they played Lola. Brady passed the role to Mingo, and “now I’ll go out on the street and then I’ll pass the baton to him,” says Mingo.

“The Wiz” was one of two shows that a young Brady always dreamed of doing one day. “I’ve always wanted to be on The Wiz.” I’ve always wanted to be on Dreamgirls. Those were two of the classics that were something of the North Star of theater as a kid. It was like, ‘Hey, if you can get on one of these shows, that means you made it.'”

The cast also includes Kyle Ramar Freeman as the lion, Phillip Johnson Richardson as the Tin Man and Avery Wilson as the Scarecrow. Schele Williams will direct and says she hopes the show will be a “touchstone for a new generation”.

The show is an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, with a book by William F. Brown and music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls.

The Wiz premiered on Broadway in 1975 and won seven Tonys, including Best Musical. It includes such classic songs as “What Would I Do If I Could Feel” and “Ease On Down the Road”.

A 1978 film version of The Wiz starred Diana Ross, Lena Horne and Richard Pryor as Wiz. Michael Jackson played the scarecrow, Nipsey Russell played the tin man and Ted Ross played the lion. NBC televised a live version in 2015, starring Queen Latifah, Ne-Yo and David Alan Grier.

Both Brady and Mingo say the show — with black actors front and center — is finding a new resonance as it progresses at a slower pace in the coming months.

“I think of all these people of color on this stage telling the story of a young woman who is lost and looking for something. Disenfranchised, she happens to meet three other young people who are all looking for something and can’t get answers from the elderly around them because the world is in chaos. She has to make an effort and find her way – now is the right time.”

Mingo, who starred in the original series Rent and The Little Mermaid, said The Wiz played an important role in inspiring his career.

“It motivated me to get into this business,” he says. “I love bringing our art to new audiences. Hopefully they will make wonderful patrons, if not art themselves.”

The original Broadway production starred Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, Dee Dee Bridgewater as the good witch Glinda, and Andre De Shields as the wizard.

Brady, who won a Primetime Emmy Award for “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” says he’ll place his wiz somewhere between Prior and De Shields.

“I already know I have two places to find inspiration. I loved Richard’s dark twist and I loved Andre’s standout twist, his panache and all the grandiosity,” he says. “So I think somewhere in the middle I’ll put my husband. I think I can add a certain charm and light to it all.”

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

The post New model of ‘The Wiz’ can be led by Wayne Brady and Alan Mingo Jr. sharing the title function | FOX 4 Kansas Metropolis WDAF-TV appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

In 1989 San Francisco had two mayors.

There was Art Agnos, voted by 70% of residents who loved the former social worker’s commitment to diversity and plans to increase affordable housing. Then there was Wayne Justmann, the so-called “Mayor of Camp Agnos” – the slang name for a hundreds of people in the Civic Center, which was supposed to put pressure on the city government to provide more services for the homeless.

“Art thought I would have cost him his re-election,” says Justmann in 1991. “But that wasn’t my intention. My intention at the time was only to ask: ‘Can you help people like me who are homeless and want to do something about it?’ “

Thirty years later, there are 2,000 more homeless people in San Francisco, and Justmann, who has served and helped shape many of The City’s homeless services, is at a loss. The 76-year-old just isn’t sure how much of what he’s learned can be carried over to homeless politics today. Because when he was homeless, drug addiction and what to do about it were not the focus of the debate.

“I don’t even remember we even smoked cannabis in the Civic Center,” says Justmann. “I don’t remember anyone having any drug problems at the time.”

For the record, smoking and drinking from pails was at least a small part of life at Camp Agnos; Anecdotes about it were reported in several papers at the time. The rhetoric about drug addiction and crime was a big part of the urge by some city dwellers to vacate the public space as well. But nightly news of half-used syringes in the streets of downtown San Francisco was only a glimmer in Rupert Murdoch’s eyes.

Mike Sugerman, a longtime TV news reporter covering Camp Agnos at the time, also confirms what Justmann says. “You needed something to get through the night, but you also needed the middle class,” he says. “So there was alcohol and pot, but I don’t remember the hard drugs at all.”

Justmann came to San Francisco in 1987 and initially stayed at the Spaulding Hotel while teaching a restaurant and hotel business course. But when he ran out of work and it became too difficult to afford the hotel, Justmann, who had been involved with the grassroots organization since college, said Justmann said it just made sense to pitch a tent in the Civic Center.

That’s because the camp was both a political movement and a sleeping place that is safe in numbers. Sugerman recalls volunteer police organized by the homeless, much like the Occupy demonstrations in 2008. Former district attorney Terence Hallinan, a then-warden, regularly visited the tents – the beginning of what was a decade-long friendship between him and Justmann. The supervisors Angela Alioto and Nancy Walker also came to visit regularly.

A 1989 Tenderloin Times newspaper with a photo and story about Camp Agnos, a homeless camp designed to put political pressure on then Mayor Art Agnos at Wayne Justmann’s apartment. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Justmann even remained well connected to Agnos, although the camp was expensive to be re-elected. “We let him work intensively with my staff because he was very knowledgeable and struggled through the hardships of homelessness to make this whole situation very clear,” says Agnos. “He was a huge help to us in developing the first homeless plan for The City.”

Sugerman and Justmann, on the other hand, met when the media-savvy activist Sugerman asked if he would like to stay in his tent overnight and see things up close. Justmann, who is gay, jokes that Sugarman was “one of the first men I slept with in San Francisco without having sex,” though Sugarman says he didn’t sleep much – he reported back then (and remembers today because Justmann kept him up all night with his snoring.

This kind of collegiality between the homeless, the media and the city administration can hardly be found today. Grassroots homeless activism is still alive, as evidenced by the occupation of an empty house on 19th Street by the ReclaimSF group last year. Groups such as the Coalition on Homelessness, founded in the Camp Agnos era, have helped shape legislation on the length of accommodation and waiting times, the use of tasers, housing and urban development preferences and homeless searches in recent years.

But while when Justmann was homeless people could organize around a single goal – access to shelter – activism today is fragmented. Questions about how drugs and mental illness are linked to the city’s homelessness problem bring groups into conflict over programs such as safe consumption points and needle exchanges. There is a clear gap between those who believe that resources should be spent on immediate short-term housing or invested in more time-consuming but longer-term plans. Homeless searches have emerged as a litmus test for Mayor London Breed’s leadership on several occasions.

“30 years ago we didn’t have to ask for a lot of different services,” says Justmann. “We didn’t have to talk about substance abuse, which would probably have been very controversial for some people. Housing and public health services are not so controversial. “

Camp Agnos made homelessness a hot topic of the day for the media and a political lightning rod for the San Franciscans. The activism had started a few years earlier, during the tenure of then Mayor Dianne Feinstein, with street protests in San Francisco as early as 1975. But Camp Agnos brought the fight to the city government’s doorstep and sounded the alarm about Feinstein’s temporary approach to the problem. The accommodation was mainly operated by churches and private hotels, with little attention paid to maintenance or the design of long-term resettlement programs. In one notorious example, old Muni buses were used as emergency shelters.

With a view to the diverse range of safe sleeping places, private hotels, accommodation and subsidized housing in The City, Justmann believes that the demands of the protesting homeless people in Camp Agnos have been met. While there were still 6,000 homeless in The City in 1989, the number was 8,000 in 2019 when The City last counted the number of unprotected residents.

Wayne Justmann, who was homeless and became a homeless activist in the late 1980s, looks at some of the old newspapers from his activist days in his apartment. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Justmann finds it difficult to find words to describe the persistence of the problem. “Housing is available if you have the knowledge to get it, and just the existence of housing was the biggest problem we had,” he says. “But we still have problems with homelessness, and I think some people like to be homeless. That may sound cold, but I think some people just say, ‘I’d rather be out here on the street than in a structured way of life.’ “

Justmann left his tent in the Civic Center when he had the opportunity to move into what is now called the Next Door Shelter, founded by a group of episcopalists on the corner of Geary and Polk. Shortly afterwards he moved into his first apartment, where he was able to settle the rent as a property manager. During this time he was also diagnosed with HIV and received rent subsidies because of his condition. He’s been positive for 33 years with no signs of slowing down.

Still a political activist, he is mainly focused on improving cannabis policy, especially for patients like him who find help in substance with symptoms like neuropathy. But while it’s no longer his main project, Justmann has remained connected to the fight against homelessness in San Francisco, using his networking skills to connect activists and, occasionally, people he knows to services.

In between his political commitments, Justmann spends his time in front of his television, listening to cable news and looking out his window onto the streets of Lower Nob Hill from a rented apartment he has lived in for over 20 years. In fact, he hasn’t lived anywhere in The City, except in the two or three square miles between Lower Nob Hill, the Tenderloin, and the Civic Center. So he is confronted with the legacy of his activism every day and thinks about possible solutions for every uninhabited person he sees sleeping down on his street.

“This is a problem that we can see up close – I can see the person sleeping on the couch or standing in line at Glide’s. It affects us all, ”he explains. “The Tenderloin is just as much a part of the city as the Sunset. This is a subject that we just need to show a little empathy and understanding about. “

virwin@sfexaminer.com

The post On the subject of San Francisco’s homeless disaster, Wayne Justmann has seen all of it appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Project description

Established as the most ambitious and exciting project yet in the company’s 70-year history, Family Handyman, a leading home improvement destination, built a 1,000-square-foot getaway home that shows home improvement shows how to get out of the woods of Northern Wisconsin. Wayne Dalton was commissioned by Family Handyman to transform a second dream home into a DIY reality using a contemporary model 8850 aluminum garage door with a black anodized frame and clear glass for a modern look with maximum visibility.

“Inspired by last year’s mantra to stay at home, Family Handyman awakened the desire to escape the daily grind that many of us came across with the idea of ​​building a quiet and functional home for a short vacation. By incorporating the 8850’s sleek design in place of a traditional wall to enhance the functionality of the home, the team was able to reinforce the Getaway home’s glass surfaces and patios and beautifully blend indoor and outdoor spaces for the ultimate vacation experience, ”said Sarah Schram, Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Wayne Dalton.

The Model 8850 garage doors installed by Lakeland Overhead Garage Door Corporation feature full-view glass panels that provide unobstructed year-round visibility. Key features of the Model 8850 include a sturdy, anodized aluminum frame, tongue and groove connections, and reinforced fins with a heavy-duty rail and mounts for years of trouble-free, trouble-free operation.

About Wayne Dalton
Wayne Dalton, a division of Overhead Door Corporation, is a world-class designer and manufacturer of residential and commercial garage doors. Wayne Dalton is known as a proactive business partner for its dealers, offering a wide range of innovative, easy-to-install products and smart sales tools to grow their business. Wayne Dalton simplifies the buying process for consumers by offering a full range of doors and styles through conveniently located dealers. Please visit wayne-dalton.com for more information

The post Wayne Dalton Storage Doorways Completes Household Handyman’s Getaway appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.