Sing Sing on stage: the Oscar-nominated drama hits New York
Recently, a few hundred people gathered in Manhattan at the New York Theater Workshop to watch a play, first written and performed about 20 years ago, where an Egyptian travels through time attempting to decipher clues that might lead to … well, it’s not entirely clear. But he encounters Robin Hood and his Merry Men, as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, among others, with a freewheeling energy that many more traditional productions rarely match. In between songs and monologues, the show’s steady supply of dad-joke puns (Robin Hood hangs out with Fryer Tuck – a fast-food specialist) is a lot less sweaty than certain other Off-Broadway productions we could name.
Related: ‘Opened my whole world up’: inside Oscar-tipped prison theater drama Sing Sing
If the particulars of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code sound familiar, it must be from exposure to the recent film Sing Sing; it’s difficult to confuse its plot with any other play. Sing Sing tells the story of the show’s real-life inception and production within the prison of its title – though the film leaves most of the play itself obscured, limiting its exposure onscreen to out-of-context moments. We know, for example, that one incarcerated individual is going to perform Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” speech, but not exactly why. For that matter, the performance in Manhattan was also incomplete, abridged to about 30 minutes. Scenes, involving Roman gladiators and Freddy Krueger, tantalizingly glimpsed in the film, did not make the cut.
The show was part encore, part reunion. Its cast was the same as the original 2005 version, produced by a prison program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. This in turn inspired Greg Kwedar’s film, where the once-incarcerated performers play themselves, opposite Colman Domingo as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a writer who helps wrangle the group’s production. (The real Divine G, rather than Domingo, participated in the live performance.) In the movie’s telling, Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code had its genesis in the men’s desire to do a big comedy, rather than another heavy production, and it appears to have been written by theater director Brent Buell (played by Paul Raci in the film) with a yes-and approach to suggestions. (Hence the presence of Freddy Krueger.)
The film is deeply moving without resorting to histrionics or grandstanding; it’s understated and warm, and the whole cast is terrific – particularly Clarence Maclin as a yard tough guy who gradually reveals a more sensitive side. It’s clear, in other words, why Sing Sing was positioned as an awards contender, even if it didn’t pay off quite as handsomely as some might have hoped. During the perhaps over-many four introductions preceding the performance – as a rule, probably best not to have introductions approach 50% of the performance length – actress J Smith-Cameron lamented its absence from the best picture nominees.
Here’s the thing: by the time Oscar nominations come out, most movies’ paths through awards season have been reduced to a binary. Either all of that campaigning, politicking and careful curation of release dates worked, and resulted in a bunch of Oscar nods, or it didn’t, consigning the movie to the dreaded category of Former Awards Hopeful (or, in a few cases, the consolation prizes of box office success or shoulda-been-a-contender critical acclaim). But for Sing Sing, one of the best movies of the year with one of the strangest release patterns, that path has been appropriately complicated.
The movie premiered at the Toronto film festival in 2023, where it was acquired by the premier indie distributor A24. The studio planned a slow-rolling, buzz-building platform release in summer 2024, much like their acquisition The Brutalist would receive at the end of the year. Instead, for reasons that remain unclear, the expansion stalled out. The movie played on a handful of screens for a full month, then slowly expanded for a few weekends before peaking on fewer than 200 screens. (The Brutalist, by contrast, was similarly scarce at first, but just spent its second weekend on more than 1,000 screens.) A24 is often more reticent about rushing to streaming than other studios, but it was nonetheless surprising that Sing Sing was kept away from any kind of at-home option for a full six months, accidentally simulating home-video release windows of 1997 or so. Instead, the movie was pushed out to 500 screens in mid-January without much promotion beyond a seeming hope for imminent Oscar nominations – then quickly vanished again. (It’s currently available to rent at home, and should eventually make its way to HBO Max.)
Even without much commercial success, the movie did manage to garner three Oscar nominations: Domingo is up for best actor, alongside recognition for the film’s adapted screenplay and original song. (It’s one that plays over the credits, presumably because the Merry Men’s number was written for another medium.) Does this indicate that A24 did their job, getting the movie in front of enough Academy eyeballs to garner this recognition, or that stronger promotion could have gotten it into best picture, or perhaps best supporting actor for Maclin? Was this performance booked, pre-nominations, under the assumption that it would help the film’s now-impossible best picture chances?
It’s hard to say – and harder to care after seeing the cast go around, after the abbreviated performance, and each speak briefly about what the Rehabilitation Through the Arts, the mentorship and friendship of Buell, and their relationships with each other have meant to them, with an open-hearted directness that the movie leaves mostly implied (and, if not ambiguous, less certain; the film doesn’t end with the whole cast merrily released). What might have served as a convincing awards-campaign capper instead served as a reminder of all the ways a movie can document far more than its own awards-season success.
