Crowns at Le Petit on heals of Tony Award winning The Band’s Visit

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

Maxwell Williams is known locally as the artistic director who transformed the French Quarter’s Le Petit Theatre from a mid-range community stage into one of the most innovative commercial playhouses in the South. He has earned particular notoriety by staging groundbreaking works of African-American playwrights – including the new production of “Crowns,” a play where a Brooklyn-born young Black woman comes to New Orleans and is embraced by her grandmother’s friends. Known as the “Hat Queens,” these strong African-American matriarchs teach her life lessons through the dozens of majestic hats that they wear, on stage at the Jackson Square playhouse through July 1st. (www.lepetittheatre.com)

However, anyone in the rest of the nation – who might have been previously unfamiliar with Maxwell Williams – has come to know him as one of the two original co-creators of the musical “The Band’s Visit,” thanks to the play’s sweep of the Tony Awards two weeks ago. The Broadway production won ten of the eleven categories in which it was nominated – including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Direction in a Musical. The play, about an Egyptian Police band mistakenly stranded in a small Israeli town, not only shut out this year’s competitors “Mean Girls” and “Frozen,” but won more Tony Awards than legendary Broadway musicals like “The Chorus Line,” “The Lion King,” or “Book of Mormon.”

Back from the celebrations in New York, Maxwell Williams returned to his regular job as artistic director at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre’ in order to close the Jackson Square playhouse’s 101st season with the production of “Crowns.”

He outlined how the “Crowns” plot centers around a young African-American woman named Yolanda. “She’s from Brooklyn [where] her brother was shot, and her mother sends her Down South. In this case, we’ve adapted it a little bit to make it more specifically New Orleans instead of kind of vague ‘Down South.’”

“She sends her down here to live with her grandmother, and her grandmother has a circle of friends who are “Hat Queens,” They own dozens, if not hundreds, of hats. And through it, Yolanda goes through this journey of learning not only about the generation before and the struggles that happened there, but also about herself. And, learning about how to become grounded and standing on her own two feet and become part of this kind of ongoing narrative that happens. And, it’s really quite beautiful.”

“Crowns” runs at Le Petit, 616 St. Peter St., through July 1, 2018.

This article originally published in the June 25, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.