Word: vereen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof it up to songs with lyrics about death. A hospital fantasy sequence looks at once like an elaborate antismoking commercial, a parody of Fellini and a Vegas floor show. The results are shocking, but not in the way that Fosse intended...
...series stretches from Kinte's African boyhood through his offspring's torturous rise from slavery in America. Unglamorized and at times disturbingly stark, Roots features Cicely Tyson as Kinte's mother, Maya Angelou as his grandmother, John Amos as Kinte in middle age, and Ben Vereen as his grandson. Kinte as a teenager will be portrayed by LeVar Burton, 19, a U.S.C. sophomore and acting novice. To give the somber story line additional star power, such big names as Lorne Greene, Lloyd Bridges, Chuck Connors, O.J. Simpson, Leslie Uggams and Doug McClure will appear in small roles...
...Vereen plays him, the M.C. is a kind of failed Mephistopheles, a combination of Joel Grey's decadent host in Cabaret and vaudeville's old-fashioned song-and-dance man. His eyes dance, roll, and turn somersaults in an amused self-parody, but they are too bright to be decadent and too playful to be evil. He tries to tempt and waylay Pippin, the show's Candide-like hero, but it is obvious that he is having too much fun to take the devil business seriously. "It began as a very small part," says Pippin...
Heaven-bent might sound better, considering Vereen's background. Not only was his father a deacon at Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church and his godfather a traveling Baptist preacher, but Vereen studied six months in a Manhattan seminary. "I was always being saved," he says of his upbringing, "getting on my knees and ridding myself of the demon." Though he quit the seminary and later had what he calls a "little lovers' quarrel" with the church, he says he went into the theater "because it allowed me to reach people in so many capacities, to build...
...school were poorer than poor-"I was skinning by on my belly," he says-his talent got him into Manhattan's famous High School of Performing Arts. That led after graduation to a job as an understudy off-Broadway, and that led absolutely nowhere. For a year, Vereen worked in the mail room of a motion-picture company, vainly hoping that somebody would notice his loud on-the-job singing, then he landed a spot in a small-town Pennsylvania production of West Side Story. There he found his first and, so far, only experience of discrimination...