‘Constant Star’ shines

NAACP honors Laguna Playhouse musical about African American activist Ida B. Wells. More than a year after its production at the Laguna Playhouse, Tazewell Thompson’s “Constant Star” is reaping prestigious honors.

The show has received nine NAACP Theater Award nominations, including three for Thompson himself -- best director, best director of a musical and best playwright.

The playhouse has been nominated in the best producer category, while Dianne Adams McDowell earned a nod as best music director. The five women who constituted the cast -- Nadiyah S. Dorsey, Quanda Johnson, Tracey Conyer Lee, Laiona Michelle and Gayle Turner -- were nominated as best ensemble.

NAACP recognition also was accorded to Donald Eastman (best set design), Fabian Obispo (best sound) and Merrily Murray-Walsh (best costumes).

“This is an extraordinary acknowledgment of a production we were all very proud to produce last season at the Laguna Playhouse,” said Executive Director Richard Stein. “We are deeply honored by this recognition.”

The five actresses in the Laguna production, staged in November 2004, portrayed activist Ida B. Wells at varying points in her life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“All five Idas advance their character’s achievement-packed life story with enormous dedication and robust ethnic flavor,” this column stated at the time. “The actresses mark the painfully slow progress of human rights in an era of black lynchings.”

The show’s cumulative effect was that it “succeeds in arousing its audience with both appreciation of the current performance and outrage at the events that inspired it.”

The NAACP Theater Awards recognize distinction among theater artists throughout Southern California in a number of artistic and technical categories.

Awards will be presented Feb. 20 at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in West Hollywood.

The awards were instituted by the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP to promote theater in Southern California, “providing acknowledgment and honor to those pioneers who laid the foundation, to those trailblazers who continue to recreate and invigorate theater and those performers who bring theater to life,” according to an NAACP spokesman.

The NAACP is known worldwide as an advocacy group for the civil rights of African Americans.20060210iueawunc(LA)The cast of “Constant Star,” left to right, Gayle Turner, Tracey Conyer Lee, Laiona Michelle, Nadiyah Dorsey and Quanda Johnson.