NEW YORK – “Red,” the anguished two-man drama about painter Mark Rothko and the timeless tug of war between art and commerce, was a big winner Sunday at the 2010 Tony Awards, receiving the best play prize and five other honors.
“This to me is the moment of my lifetime,” said “Red” playwright John Logan.
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The play picked up prizes for Michael Grandage, who won for best director of a play, and Eddie Redmayne, who won featured performance by an actor in a play as the increasingly disillusioned assistant to Rothko, the abstract expressionist who agonizes over whether to accept a lucrative commission for the Four Seasons restaurant.
“Red,” starring Alfred Molina as Rothko, was also honored for best lighting design of a play, best sound design and best scenic design.
“Fences,” a revival of August Wilson’s deeply personal drama about family, won for best revival of a play and its two stars, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, won for best actors in a play.
“My mother always says, ‘Man gives the award, God gives the reward.’ I guess I got both tonight,” Washington said after winning for his performance as the sanitation man who might have been a baseball star. It was his first Tony Award and nomination.
Sandler says high school is like Disney World
MANCHESTER, N.H. – Actor and comedian Adam Sandler gave comic comparisons between high school and adult life at his alma mater.
Sandler told graduates Saturday at Manchester Central High School in Manchester, N.H., that high school is like “always being at Disney World,” while “the real world is very mean and scary.”
Sandler said if your girlfriend dumps you in high school and you camp out in her yard to try and win her back, it’s considered to be cute. But he said in adult life it’s stalking and you’ll go to jail.
Sandler graduated from Central High School in 1984.
Jason Mraz works to help ‘end slavery worldwide’
NEW YORK – While Shakira, the Black Eyed Peas and other top musicians are in Africa to help kick off the World Cup, singer Jason Mraz was on the continent for another reason: to help free slaves.
The 31-year-old Grammy winner was in Ghana this week with Free the Slaves, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “end slavery worldwide.”
Mraz, from Mechanicsville, Va., spent five days in the country, traveling with James Kofi Annan, a former child slave who used to work on fishing boats and had been enslaved for seven years.
Annan founded Challenging Heights, a school in Winneba where many of its students are former slaves. The children performed songs for Mraz.
The singer also traveled to a rescue shelter for slaves in the town of Atebubu and to Lake Volta, where many child slaves are working, said Peggy Callahan, the organization’s co-founder and executive producer.
Callahan says she met Mraz through a mutual friend and she suggested he go to Ghana with her.
“The movement to end slavery really needs more voices, but they really need to be authentic voices, people who really do care about an issue,” she said. “And Jason’s one of those people, and he’s willing to take the time to find out.”
Mraz is the first celebrity to participate on the ground with the organization.
The pop singer is also busy working on the follow-up to his platinum-selling CD, 2008’s “We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things.”
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