True-life prison drama ‘Sing Sing’ celebrates power of art
When Colman Domingo became a frontrunner for last year’s Best Actor Oscar – nominated for his star turn as the titular civil rights hero in “Rustin” – it was big news for the LGBTQ community.
He was the first openly gay Afro-Latino to be nominated for the award. Had he won, he would have been the first openly gay actor to take the category, and only the second out queer performer to win in any of the acting categories.
It would have been a milestone. Yet his loss, somehow, didn’t seem much of a disappointment: Colman’s prodigious talent (also on display in last year’s “The Color Purple”) seemed to assure fans that it would get another chance – and “Sing Sing,” now in theaters nationwide after an auspicious debut at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, might very well be the movie that gets it for him.
In it, Domingo portrays John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility who has become a pillar of the prison’s “Rehabilitation Through the Arts” (RTA) program, through which he and fellow participants collaborate on the creation and performance of theater presentations for the larger prison population.
