Timothy Ware-Hill Creates Pro-Black Poetry Web-series with The PRIDE Project

Since replacing actors Billy Porter and Wayne Brady, Broadway veteran actor-singer Timothy Ware-Hill took on a role with the ever-popular Kinky Boots as Lola, the fabulous beyond compare drag artist and shoemaker. Stepping out as a vocal champion of civil rights and the escalating Black Lives Matter movement, Ware-Hill, a musical theatre triple-threat and poet partnered with Altered Pictures to create a series of video-recorded monologues and epitaphs about the black experience and confronting the stereotypes of people of color in America. Titled “The Pride Project,” the web-series is one of several that have incubated from Broadway’s finest, but is so far the only one that has addressed the taboo and hot-button issues like racism, intersectionality, cultural colonization and coded language head on.

Written by Ware-Hill, the monologues are performed in front of a white backdrop by a multicultural coterie of Broadway and off-Broadway talent that include Kyle Scatliffe (The Color Purple, Les Misérables), Alex Chester (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Hello Dolly!), Kelvin Moon Loh (SpongeBob: The Musical, The King and I, Here Lies Love), Steven Goldsmith (Rock of Ages, Jersey Boys, Fame), Kimberly Marable (The Book of Mormon, Sister Act, The Lion King), Laiona Michelle (Amazing Grace, The Book of Mormon), Lacretta Nicole (Disaster!, The Book of Mormon), Pamela Shandrow (Wicked, The Phantom of Opera) Diana Sanchez (Papi/Flaco, Brooklyn At Eye Level) and Ware-Hill himself.

In “The Big Black…,” Scatliffe talks about the fetishization of black male bodies and the mainstream repulsion that comes with the notion of dating them. In “China Doll,” Chester and Moon describe the Asian American experience of being lumped into a singular category and the loss of identity that backfires in the process. In “Mama,” Goldsmith acknowledges the superpowers of black maids divided between two households, raising two families without complaint. In “The T-Word,” Marable and Michelle confront the coded language of thug and how it has been substituted for The N-Word. In the body-positive love letter “xoxo Jasmine,” Nicole and Shandrow encourages mainstream to challenge beautiful standards. In the conservative kiss-off “Literally,” Sanchez looks at the language barrier, immigrant reform and American entitlement. Finally, in “I’m Lovin’ It,” Ware-Hill unapologetically celebrates blackness.

All of the monologues are performed with the actors staring down the barrel of camera lens and in the nude, often with minimal props and in tight angles or medium close-up shots. This creates a haunting and cathartic effect.

In a Facebook post on July 14, expressed the inspiration for the series with the release of the seventh and final video in the “The Pride Project,” stating: “How do you love the skin that you’re in when society equates light with good, but dark with evil? This poem embraces “the dark side” and unapologetically celebrates Blackness. This is the final poem in “The Pride Project.” In light of what has gone on, is going on, and continues to go on in our country, this piece is very important to me. There has been a target on my back and the backs of Black people since birth. Today I celebrate that with which makes us all beautiful. So forgive me for ego tripping… or don’t. Either way, Im’ma say what I wanna say!”