George C. Wolfe
Encyclopedia : G : GE : GEO : George C. Wolfe
- For other people named , see {{{1.
Wolfe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, at the time a heavily-segregated city. He attended the all-black private school at which his mother taught before pursuing a BA in theater at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wolfe then taught for several years in Los Angeles and later in New York, where he received an MFA in dramatic writing and musical theater at New York University in 1983.
Wolfe's first offerings--the musical Paradise (1985), his play The Colored Museum (1986)--were off-Broadway productions that met with mixed reviews. In 1989, however, Wolfe won an Obie award for best off-Broadway director for his play Spunk, an adaptation of three stories by Zora Neale Hurston.
Wolfe gained a national reputation with his 1991 musical Jelly's Last Jam, a musical about the life of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton; after a Los Angeles opening, the play moved to Broadway, where it received 11 Tony nominations. Two years later, Wolfe directed Tony Kushner's Angels in America to great critical acclaim as well as a Tony award; he also directed the second half, Perestroika, the following year.
In 1996, Wolfe created the musical Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, an ensemble of tap and music starring Savion Glover; his work won him a second Tony award for direction and was an enormous financial success.
Despite a kidney transplant from his brother William Wolfe in the late 1990s, George C. Wolfe continued to direct plays such as Kushner's Caroline, or Change and Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog.
In late 2004, Wolfe announced his intention to leave the theater for film direction, beginning with the well-received HBO film Lackawanna Blues.
External links
- [George C. Wolfe bio]
- [George C. Wolfe at the Internet Broadway Database]
- [George C. Wolfe at the Internet Movie Database]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.