Biographies
Jordan Roth is the President of Jujamcyn Theaters whose current productions include: The Book of Mormon, Hair, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, Jersey Boys, the upcoming Lysistrata Jones and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. He also created Givenik.com, where theatergoers can purchase discounted tickets and give 5% of their ticket price to the charity of their choice.
Alluring audiences with emotionally tinged performances has been the signature of Angela Bassett, who personifies a sense of dignity and pride whenever she appears on screen. Angela will also reprise her role Bernadine Harris in Getting to Happy, Terry McMillan’s sequel to Waiting to Exhale, based on McMillan's novel. Forest Whitaker is set to return as director. Angela will soon be seen in the McG helmed film, This Means War for 20th Century Fox. This past summer she was seen in Jumping the Broom and DC Comics’ Green Lantern.
Perhaps best known for her intense portrayal of Tina Turner in the biopic What's Love Got to Do With It opposite Laurence Fishburne, Angela earned the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Motion Picture, and an Academy Award nomination for her powerful performance. She was first seen in a small but rich role as the ambitious single mother who sends her son to live with his father in John Singleton’s Boyz In The Hood. Other memorable roles include, Terry McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale co-starring Whitney Houston. Angela has also received NAACP Image Awards for performances in films such as How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Bassett received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for her performance in Ruby's Bucket of Blood and an Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a television movie for her work in The Rosa Parks Story.
She also received an Emmy nomination for the "Uncle Jed's Barbership" episode of PBS’ Storytime; and critical nods for narrating the miniseries, Africans in America, also for PBS. Angela’s other notable television roles have included the final season of NBC’s hit primetime series E.R., as Dr. Cate Banfield.
Beginning her career on stage and continuing to this day, this Yale School of Drama graduate completed several productions on and off Broadway, which include Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Colored People's Time, Henry IV, Part I, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Antigone, Pericles and Black Girl. She returned to the stage in 1998 to star opposite Alec Baldwin in Macbeth at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York, in 2005 starred with her husband, Courtney B. Vance, in the North American Premier production of John Guare’s stage adaptation of His Girl Friday at the historic Guthrie Theater, and recently received rave reviews for her work with Fishburne in August Wilson’s classic play Fences at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse.
Angela is working on her directorial debut, United States, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett and adapted by Dwayne Johnson-Cochran the dramatic comedy follows Monk Ellison, a prominent black literary figure. Ellison writes a faux biography from the perspective of a barely literate hoodlum to decry what is wrong with the glorification of “ghetto” culture but when the book is lauded as a possible contender for the National Book Award, he must choose between pride and fame.