Audible will continue its spring programming with the New York premiere of Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie. Developed in collaboration with and directed by Amanda Watkins, the monologue play will run March 17–April 19.
In Approval Junkie, comedian and Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning shares her personal story of a lifetime spent looking for validation in all the wrong places. As with all Audible productions, the show will be recorded live and made available as an audio production on the platform at a later date.
“There are those brave artists who create art for art’s sake, who generously share their voices with no need for applause. I am obviously not one of those,” says Salie. “I’m thrilled and honored to bring Approval Junkie to Audible Theatre, to ask nakedly for applause and laughter, and to bring to its vast audience these stories which are mostly inappropriate for my children to hear.”
“I’ve been a Faith Salie fan for many years,” adds Kate Navin, the artistic producer of Audible Theater. “It’s a privilege to be able to bring her laugh-out-loud humor and wit to Audible’s members and live audiences at the Minetta Lane.”
Approval Junkie joins the upcoming productions of Dan Rather’s ‘Stories of a Lifetime,’ which will play the Minetta Lane February 18 and 19; In Love and Struggle, which will bring together women of color for monologues, music, comedy, and tributes (February 28–March 1); and a limited run of Liza Jessie Peterson’s acclaimed solo Peculiar Patriot (March 5–7). Read more here.
Roundabout Theatre Company opened the Off-Broadway premiere of new musical Darling Grenadine as part of its Underground programming February 10. Written by Daniel Zaitchik, the bittersweet Manhattan story follows charismatic songwriter Harry and his relationships with Louise, his brother Paul, and his beloved dog.
Darling Grenadine began January 16 in the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, where it is scheduled to run through March 15.
The creative team for Darling Grenadine at Roundabout includes set designer Tim Mackabee, costume designer Emily Rebholz, lighting designer Lap Chi Chu, sound designer Brian Ronan, projection designer Edward T Morris, music director David Gardos, orchestrator Matthew Moisey, and animal trainer William Berloni.
Roundabout Underground debuts its first new musical in a decade. When charismatic songwriter Harry falls for clever chorus girl Louise, all of Manhattan glitters with the blush of new love. But what happens when the sparkling fantasy begins to dissolve Bubbling over with charm, wit, and whimsy, Darling Grenadine navigates the tension between romance and reality, light and dark, bitter and sweet. Featuring a vibrantly eclectic score and stirring book and lyrics by Daniel Zaitchik.
A glance at Nnamdi Asomugha’s Wikipedia page immediately reveals he’s not like other actors. He didn’t grow up doing the school play or working on tech crew or earn his BFA or even realize an affinity for acting until he was in his 30s. Asomugha hadn’t tried theatre because he was focused on something else entirely: football.
Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, but raised in Los Angeles, Asomugha was a natural athlete—and not just casually. After graduating UC Berkeley, where he played for the California Golden Bears, he was drafted in the first round of the 2003 NFL draft to the Oakland Raiders. In his 11-year football career (with the Raiders, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the San Francisco 49ers), he was a star cornerback—voted All-Pro four times, a three-year team captain, and the highest paid defensive back in NFL history. He retired in 2013 (the same year he married actor-producer Kerry Washington); but it was actually football that first got him into the acting game.
Nnamdi Asomugha Joseph Marzullo/WENN
Doing commercial work, “and having directors and different people saying, ‘You’re very gifted at this; I know it’s just a Nike commercial but this is something that you should really look forward to doing when you’re done’ really encouraged me,” Asomugha tells Playbill. Suddenly, Asomugha had an idea of one thing he might like to try when he finished with football “because you have no clue what you’re going to do when you finish playing football, so you try a bunch of things, and I knew that this could be one of them.”
Yet, Hollywood came knocking before that. Peter Beg, who had directed him in a Nike commercial, offered him a guest role as a police officer on Friday Night Lights in 2009—at the height of his NFL career. He fell in love with it.
Soon after, he performed in a staged reading of a John Patrick Shanley play at Circle in the Square; he wrote and starred in a short film, Double Negative. While it seemed Asomugha would follow the Tinsel—producing Beasts of No Nation, producing and starring in Crown Heights—theatre called to him.
“With theatre, it’s life for me,” he says. “You’re breathing the same air as the audience. You hit go and you can’t stop until it’s all over. There are no mistakes because it’s just real life. If you drop your brush, you’ve gotta go pick it up. There’s no calling cut, which I love.”
Ngozi Anyanwu and Nnamdi Asomugha Carol Rosegg
He made his Off-Broadway debut with a lauded performance in last season’s Good Grief at the Vineyard Theatre, and on January 21, he made his onstage Broadway debut in Roundabout Theatre Company’s A Soldier’s Play, where his team mentality has proved crucial in his stoic, yet provocative performance as First Class Melvin Peterson (one of seven Black men questioned by visiting military police officer Captain Richard Davenport about the murder of his troupe’s Sergeant, Vernon C. Waters Charles Fuller’s now Pulitzer Prize-winning play).
“I found him through a lot of help and good coaching from [director] Kenny [Leon] and the other guys in the company,” he says. “They’ve helped shape the character just as much as I have. They’ve been doing plays their whole lives so if they find something that I can tweak that focuses me more into the character then they let me know.” But Asomugha underplays the value and perspective he brings to the role.
As part of a story that highlights the variation within the Black experience, Peterson prefers to call Hollywood (rather than his native Alabama) home. He is a thinker, highly educated, outspoken, respected by his peers in the black battalion at Fort Neal—despite his temper. Asomugha balances the facets of this complex, fully developed man. “The goal was to bring as much warmth to him as possible,” says Asomugha. “He’s very revolutionary and can come across as telling people what to do. But he’s kind of a warm guy, he wants everyone to get along.”
A born leader—and former NFL team captain—Asomugha wields a quiet power onstage. He knows when to catch the light and when to lend an assist. His strategic mind comes into play as he probes Peterson’s philosophical approach to bettering the race as a whole.
“I think the interesting thing is how similar Peterson and Waters are and that they both want the best for their race. They just go about it two different ways,” he notes. “Who’s the good guy who’s the bad guy? By the end of the play they’re kind of in the same boat.”
As the murder mystery of A Soldier’s Play unfolds, Asomugha does well to take the drama moment by moment—as he does in life. His Broadway opening took place during the Sundance Film Festival, where Sylvie’s Love, a film produced and starred in opposite Tessa Thompson, premiered. But his focus never left the building. Asomugha is the kind of person and the kind of actor who doesn’t get ahead of himself.
“The most important thing to do when you go out onstage,” he says, “is to not know what happens next.”
