Rain Pyror

Mixed Rain Productions INC

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Los Angeles Times by David C. Nichols

To Be Young, Jewish and black

Irreverent hilarity spices up "Fried Chicken and Latka's," ... Rain Pryor's account of growing up black, Jewish and Richard Pryor's daughter is an effective showcase for ripe talent.

Pryor, accompanied by ace musical director Gail Johnson, starts in swinging, her opening number putting thematic new lyrics to Kander and Ebb's "Cabaret": "What's the big deal if I'm black and a Jew?/ In temple, I sing the blues. / Life is fried chicken and latkes, too:/ I'll make Shabbat for you!" This insouciance just barely prepares her audience for the ribald, bumptious scenario that ensues.

Pryor's crazy-quilt chronological trajectory illuminates her personal and professional saga with instant characterizations, musical numbers and freewheeling aphorisms that range from corny to convulsive under Tracy Silver's direction, augmented by Clinton Derriks-Carroll. Pryor's Modigliani-moppet expressions, kinetic ease, powerful singing voice comic ingenuity are invaluable assets. Conversing with the audience as her paternal grandmother (which is worth the whole enterprise), or sporting an Afro the size of Belize (designed by John Stapleton), Pryor's is wickedly funny and sharply observant, as in her uproarious send-ups of her mother and maternal grandmother. ...

Pryor's fertile material and cathartic intent fully warrant full-length expansion beyond this cabaret-style format. Given the clamor at the reviewed performance, she certainly has the audience to justify such architectural additions.

Fringe review: Rain Pryor

By Charles Pamment
BBC News website

Rain Pryor opens the doors to her family life

Rain Pryor, daughter of the US comic actor Richard, puts on a humorous and moving performance for Fringe audiences with her show Fried Chicken and Latkes, based on her father's life.

Rain Pryor is the offspring of one of America's greatest, and in many people's eyes the greatest, black comedians of the 20th Century.

It would be a hard act to follow if it wasn't for the fact that she is not competing with the likes of her father but is instead more representative of him and his art.

Her style is largely anecdotal, punctuated with her own one-liners, and relies heavily on recounting her early years in a manner - and with a stage presence - reminiscent of her father.

But Rain's outstanding skill within the Pryor family is an excellent ability as a character actress, she leaps effortlessly from imitating one of her life's influences to another, pearling them together as if telling a story.

She touches on her mother's "Jewishness" counter-pointed by her father's "blackness", but includes anyone who had any major influence whatsoever.

On occasion it is difficult to follow her mode of speech due to some of the jargon she employs, but I'm sure she will adapt her diction as she tours the country.

Natural performer

Her comedy is raw, often touching and emotive, her reference to her father's love of women is dealt with by referring to his several wives waiting in the hospital waiting room for news after his highly publicised suicide attempt in the early 80s.

Her experiences of racism while growing up in the turbulent years of 1970s America are told with piercing reality but, just like her father, she tells the tales by taking slices of human life and making them funny to audiences of all ethnic backgrounds.

All in all she is a natural performer with a good repertoire and, for followers/lovers of Richard Pryor, provides an interesting insight into the goings-on of the Pryor family. The show's engaging enough for the time to pass effortlessly, especially if you are the one she chooses for a little audience participation.

The Stage Edinburgh 2007

Review by Jeremy Austin. Published Friday 18 August 2006

Ella, Meet Marilyn

Pleasance Dome

Writer and critic Bonnie Greer has created in Ella, Meet Marilyn a show that entertains, informs and does absolute justice to two of the icons of American entertainment.

Based on their real-life friendship, Greer uses her characters to explore pre-Civil Rights America and how behind the veneer of showbusiness gloss was the grubby world of political and social oppression.

Fitzgerald, for all her stardom, was still viciously attacked by apartheid America - singled out for body searches, ripped off, abused - while Monroe, with her own impoverished background, was desperate to be recognised as an intelligent woman rather than just a sexual object.

Performances are excellent. Rain Pryor, who debuted at Edinburgh two year’s ago with her highly-praised autobiographical performance, has a rich soulful voice that does justice to Fitzgerald’s songs. Her characterisation - Ella both young and old - comes from deep within and she gives conviction to Greer’s words.

Coronation Street star Sally Lindsay presents Monroe as a person caught up in her own stereotype - at once the woman desperate to make Shakespeare with Olivier through her own production company but also unable to shake the ditsy blonde. Her fight against McCarthyism is as surprising as it is admirable.

A well-received show with an audience of mixed ages, this should tour well beyond Edinburgh.

FOURTH ONE 97.3 UK

Ella Meet Marilyn
Pleasance Dome

This new play by Newsnight Review regular Bonnie Greer is set in the 1950s and explores the unlikely friendship between Hollywood bombshell, Marilyn Monroe and jazz diva, Ella Fitzgerald. An unusual mix of biography, politics and song, the play uses the relationship between the two women to explore the cultural history of the time; from the growing civil rights movement to the paranoia of the McCarthy years. Coronation Street's Sally Lindsay is excellent in her portrayal of Marilyn - an intelligent and policised woman who was described by Fitzgerald as being "ahead of her time". Rain Pryor shines as Ella, especially when she steps up to the microphone to deliver such classics as "Everytime We Say Goodbye". All in all, this is a play that is very accessible in its politics and which offers a new and interesting perspective on two of America's most iconic women.

THEATRE GUIDE LONDON

Ella, Meet Marilyn Pleasance Dome - In the 1950s Marilyn Monroe used her influence, and possibly her sexual favours, to get her idol Ella Fitzgerald a major night club booking that transformed the singer's career. Ella remained forever grateful, while also chafing under the burden of Marilyn's emotional neediness. This is the basis for Bonnie Greer's new play, whose biggest weakness lies in unremittingly cliche-filled dialogue but whose strength is in its imagined characterisations of the two women - Marilyn the perpetual innocent who imagines herself worldly-wise enough to offer career and life counsel, and Ella the experienced and street-smart woman who nonetheless demands the right to hang on to her dreams. Sally Lindsay wears the white dress and attempts the breathy little-girl voice, but in no way looks like, sounds like or evokes the spirit of Monroe. Rain Pryor plays Fitzgerald as generic older-black-woman, which may even be accurate. But every few minutes the play stops to allow Pryor to sing, not in Ella's style but in her own strong blues-and-jazz voice, and I would say that alone was worth the price of admission except that Pryor is also appearing nightly at another venue without an uneven play to stand between her singing and us. Gerald Berkowitz

BackStage West by Brad Scheiber

Say loud: "I'm black, Jewish, and proud." That update of

a 1960's aphorism would seem appropriate for Rain Pryor, whose cabaret-style show exhibits an impressive range of talent, from comedy and drama to singing and shaking one's groove thing. The daughter of Richard Pryor, she complains not only of the confusion of race and religious identity but also of familial antagonisims. Apparently her famous father bought her a multicolored Afro wig and a Mr. Microphone while her half sister got a house and trust fund.

But la Pryor certainly got the better part of the bargain in talent genes, exhibited by her hilarious, spot -on soul sista' Yiddishkeit rap and schtick, plus faciltiy for general mimicry that ameliorates the pain she aslo went through. "For years I walked around like a demon possessed poodle," Pryor claims, but to her credit she is not playing just for laughs. ... Pryor also pulls out another ace: her singing voice. It proves supple and strong, most movingly in her rendition of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's "God Give Me Strength" .... Pryor gets to go to the head of the class for bravado, charm, and honesty, whether she is depicting her struggle for identity in the never-ending class war in Beverly Hills or showing us her delightfully foul mouthes grandmother.

Pryor ‘Reigns’ at The Canon Theater

By Jerome Robinson Tolucan Times

The Canon Theater proves that “Real women have curves” and overcome life’s obstacles by making “Fried Chicken and Latkas.”
Rain Pryor (the daughter of legendary comedian Richard Pryor) has become a captivating beauty. The skinny child actress, whose frizzy hair was more prominent than her face as Tomboy T.J. Jones on the sitcom “Head of the Class,” uses that same hair as a benevolent distraction from a voluptuous body and a face that captures the loveliness for which Pablo Picasso painted his women. She is a unique beauty, in a class of her own.

On stage, Pryor has no bad side or angle. She is like a Rococo painting: Gloriously complicated eye candy. But what really makes her one-woman show “Fried Chicken and Latkas” soar, is Pryor’s vulnerability and candor. She scoops the National Enquirer with priceless stories that only the daughter of Richard Pryor could reveal. However, this is not a “Daddy Dearest” tale. This is a love song to her family and friends.

The play recalls Rain Pryor’s tumultuous life, growing up in Beverly Hills as the daughter of the famous comedian and a Jewish mother. “I was proud, but felt so guilty for it,” confesses Rain. From musician Miles Davis, playing his horn as a good-night lullaby to Hollywood Lawn (a transvestite and Andy Warhol associate), Rain had an array of baby sitters and characters parading through her life. Sometimes she felt that “everybody belonged to a club that she didn’t receive the password for.”

Although her father and mother divorced when she was six months old (and she lived with her mother), her grandmothers richly influenced Rain. Her maternal grandmother taught Rain to make potato latkas while telling her how special she was and that “Sammy Davis Jr. was famous for being black and Jewish.” Her fraternal grandmother, who gave her the recipe for fried chicken, was a brothel madame: “Remember, you come from a long line of madames, whores and pimps on your father’s side and on your mother’s side you come from a line of biblical proportions.”

Rain is a remarkable actress and gifted singer. Her characterizations are three-dimensional. She disappears and her Jewish grandmother and Richard Pryor’s mother appear. You forget that Rain is just acting. Her characterization of Richard Pryor’s mother was so moving that a few members of the audience began communicating with her. Rain didn’t miss a beat and wonderfully improvised. Rain is her father’s daughter – a true talent! (P.S.: The lighting design by Brian Knox was superb.)

CBS MORNING NEWS
Rain Pryor: Shalom, My Brothers
April 18, 2004

Rain Pryor took center stage in the place that launched her father, Richard Pryor, into the comedy stratosphere – The Comedy Store

"I mean, here I am at the Comedy Store! On the very stage, in the very place that history was created by my father ... Richard Pryor," says Rain Pryor. "I used to sleep in booths out here."

The Comedy Story is now a door to her future, as CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker reports.

"Is it intimidating at all? Of course it is," she says. "It's intimidating, because I know, without a doubt, there's someone who's thinking they're coming to see me, but they're really coming to see my dad … They better go rent a video, because this ain't my daddy's standup."

It's her show, "Fried Chicken and Latkes." Rain has been polishing and performing it in theaters around Los Angeles. It's about her life as the conflicted daughter of a celebrated black father and a Jewish mother.

"So there I was, this black and Jewish kid growing up in Beverly Hills, which meant I was proud, ... but felt so guilty for it," she laughs from the stage.

She says she has wanted to do the show for the last decade, but she wasn't ready until now.

"I wrote this show in three-and-a-half weeks, you know, and it was out and it was done," she remembers.

Vivid characters came pouring out as a result. She portrays white teenager Samantha:

"Oh, my God, Rain. Your hair is soooo big! Oh, I can barely see the mirror through your big hair! Like what do you have in there, anyway? You are soooo Afro-sheen Barbie!"

Like a chameleon, Rain changes into Wanita:

"As a matter of fact, girl didn't know she was black until she met me. And she was always going out with white boys. But she did date a black boy like, what? Once. And he wasn't all the way black. He was like -- blackinese."

"There's not a thing about her that doesn't work," says actor/director Carl Reiner. "She sings, she moves, she does humor. She knows who she is."

Rain fills the stage with characters who filled her life, such as her Jewish grandmother:

"Why do we light the Friday night Shaboos candles? We do this to welcome in the weekend by reflecting back on what we have done during the week. But we try not to reflect too hard, because that's why we become depressed."

Pryor also transforms into "Mama," her father's grandmother:

"Rain was born on her father's side to a prestigious line of pimps, madams and prostitutes. See, Richard Pryor is a fine and generous man. You can ask any hooker."

And woven throughout the show is Rain's complex relationship with her father.

"Papa, can you hear me? Papa, can you see me? See me? He barely even knew me. He was too busy making movies and [mimics smoking] had way too much on his mind," she says in her act.

In her work and her life, she has had to come to terms with Richard Pryor, the man the world knows as a tragic comic genius.

Rain knows all about his genius and his flaws: his womanizing and, as she told Sunday Morning's Russ Mitchell in 1995, his drugs.
"It was really Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he wasn't experimenting with chemicals, he was there. When he was, it was another -- it was tough," she said in the interview.

It was also tough on her strong-willed mother, who raised Rain after Richard Pryor left them.

In "Fried Chicken and Latkes," she remembers her mother saying:
"Rain, take that plastic bag off your head! This won't bring your father to visit. You know why, Rain? He doesn't care, Rain! He doesn't care! When he left us and we went on welfare, it was me who got us off, Rain! I am the black man in your life, Rain."

She says she talks about some very painful things in her life because life is painful.

"I've survived a lot of stuff that I think someone of 34 shouldn't have to really survive, but I survived it, and I think with that, there comes a freedom," she says.

It's that freedom to make comedy out of her own battle with drugs and alcohol, her string of failed romances and her father's succession of wives.
The show is what she's always dreamed of doing.

"Out of the womb, the day I was given the rainbow-colored Afro-wig, the diva in me came out," she laughs.

She found work early as a regular on the sitcom "Head of the Class" and on stage in the musical "Sisterella."

But even as she played a lesbian junkie on Showtime's "Rude Awakening," Hollywood told her she wasn't black enough, she wasn't white enough, she wasn't pretty enough.

"Then I wasn't working at all and it was really hard for me, because for years after that, all I heard was, 'Yeah, she's talented, but God, she's ugly,'" remembers Pryor.

Casting agents just couldn't figure her out. Now she's finding herself, a process that may have begun with her father's illness. She took questions after one performance.

"When he got sick with multiple sclerosis, I think it put everything to me into perspective. I think there comes a place where you really have to have peace," she says.

Accepting her father, she came to accept herself. In the mid-'90s, they even played father and daughter in a "Chicago Hope" episode about M.S.

By her 2002 wedding, he couldn't walk her down the aisle, but he was there. And Rain Pryor's mother, Shelly Bonis (former hippie and civil rights advocate), is out advocating for her daughter. Bonis is out in the streets and fairs giving people cards about her daughter's play.

Elizabeth Pryor -- Richard other half-Jewish daughter from another marriage -- came to see Rain's show. And, the two have fallen in love.

"I think I didn't realize there was only one other black Jew who was Richard Pryor's daughter, and that was my sister," says Elizabeth Pryor. "When I saw 'Fried Chicken and Latkes,' I thought 'Black, Jew, Richard Pryor's daughter -- oh, my God! We have a lot in common!'"

But Rain's personal story, which she considered so idiosyncratic and so outrageous, seems to have something to say to most everyone who comes through the door.

Now clean and sober, married, happy and with plans for Broadway, Rain's past is powering her into the future.

"Because I'm standing on my own two feet and I have become Rain, I am comfortable with being a Pryor," she says. "I feel it's my right, it's my legacy. What I'm doing up there on that stage is the real tribute.

"I'm black and a Jew! Shalom, my brothers! Oy vey!"