FAKE THEATER
P. Diddy sheds rap for 'Raisin'

Oh my God. Tell me it's not true. Rapper and professional moron Sean "Puffy" Combs is playing the lead in a Broadway revival of the classic play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. From MSNBC:

“I want somebody who can make me believe the three-dimensional quality to Walter Lee,” Leon, former head of the Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta, says. “Walter Lee is a man who has his good side and his bad side and his wrinkles and his warts and his smooth side. He’s a smart man, he’s an intelligent man — he’s not just an angry black man. ... Sean has crafted a Walter Lee that allows you to understand the man.”

While Combs is aware of the play’s importance, he had never seen the movie version and failed to complete an assigned reading of the play when he was a teenager.

“I was supposed to read the book back in high school but I never read the book. I did the Cliff Notes,” he says, referring to the abbreviated synopsis series popular with some students.

“I couldn’t do the Cliff Notes for the play though,” he says with a laugh.

His name became attached to the revival of “Raisin” when his acting coach encouraged him to audition: “I didn’t think that I would really get the part, though.”

Leon says Combs was not only cast because of the strength of his acting, but because he would bring a new demographic to Broadway: young hip-hop fans who may not have ever seen a theater production before. Combs himself is not a theatergoer, having seen few plays in his life.

Click here for the rest.

I think I'll let the great actor Samuel L. Jackson comment on this kind of travesty for me (quote courtesy of the Internet Movie Database):

"To take people from the music world and give them the same kind of credibility and weight that you give me, Morgan Freeman, Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker - that's an aberration to me. It's not my job to lend credibility to so-and-so rapper who's just coming into the business. I know there's some young actor sitting in New York or LA who has spent half of his life learning how to act and sacrificing to learn his craft, but isn't going to get his opportunity because of some actor who's been created."

'Nuff said.

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