Marcel spears gay
Exclusive: Q&A with Marcel Spears
From hit tv shows to the bright lights of Broadway, Marcel Spears is an acting legend in the making. Fresh off a glowing performance in the Tony nominated Overweight Ham and knee thick in season 6 of CBS hit comedy The Neighborhood, Marcel takes period to talk with us about acting, good voice and more.
The Knockturnal: Hello, Marcel. Nice to see you.
Marcel Spears: Hey, Joshua. How’s it going?
The Knockturnal: I’m good. I’m great. How are you?
Marcel Spears: I am well.
The Knockturnal: Well, I just saw you on Sunday nighttime in Fat Ham. Congratulations. That was so hilarious. That’s a great exhibit. First time seeing it.
Marcel Spears: Oh, thank you.
The Knockturnal: Of course, of course. So your personality Juicy in Fat Ham is pretty different from your character in The Neighborhood, which we all know you from obviously, in its sixth season. What do you transport differently to each character? How does your approach differ?
Marcel Spears: I imply, obviously everything comes through me, like through the lens of me. So, like I look at this character and I find the places where we are similar
‘Fat Ham’ Review: James Ijames’s Gay Black Hamlet Speaks to Many on Broadway
“It’s Shakespeare,” explains Juicy (Marcel Spears), the queer, Jet, Southern stand-in for Hamlet, after paraphrasing a line from that play in James Ijames’s Fat Ham. “Kind of.” His mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), who’s just gotten married to the brother of her recently deceased husband, replies with withering dismissiveness: “You watch too much PBS.”
Now in its Broadway show, following an off-Broadway manage at the Public Theater last season plus the 2022 Pulitzer for drama, Fat Ham has start the sweet spot, leaning into the parallels with its dramatic ancestor when it suits the play’s deep wells of humor and tenderness but comfortably casting off Shakespeare’s shadow whenever it grows too overbearing.
“You act like he got all the answers,” Tedra scoffs of “that dead old white man,” but Juicy’s reverence—and certainly Ijames’s—for Shakespeare is authentic. He may not be the perfect companion for this lost young spirit, working toward a degree in human resources at the University of Phoenix online and currently suffocating at a backyard barbecue celebrating his mother’s remarriage to his toxic uncle
Marcel Spears
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What I love most about seeing Fat Ham in its shift from The Public Theatre (my review of the Public Theater production) to Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre, are the sardonic tropes which send up William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a Jacobean revenge tragedy, where privileged white royals end up slaughtering each other for power with a particular lack of grace, wisdom and spirituality. Fat Ham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, James Ijames, writes with a joyous, “diabolical” and a steel-sharpened keyboard, with which he extracts the choicest cuts of the Bard’s meatiest speeches, to expose the enlightened soul of the would-be avenger of his father’s killer, Juicy (the sublime Marcel Spears). Directed by Saheem Ali Fat Ham’s transfer is a delectable winner.
Juicy is the “fat ham,” shortened for Hamlet. The title references Juicy’s necessary acting “chops” in his pursuit of the truth. The title also refers to the succulent pork roast plumping his middle. Ham is also one of the items being served at the barbecue wedding celebration “hono
.