Keke Palmer will be the first African-American to play Cinderella on Broadway
Beginning Sept. 9, actress Keke Palmer will put on glass slippers to star in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella at the Broadway Theatre. She is the first African-American to play the role on Broadway.
"[This] is going to be a dream come true for me," Palmer told The Associated Press. "Not to mention that Stuart Weitzman made the glass slippers I'll be wearing."
This is the 21-year-old's professional stage debut, but Palmer has starred in several movies and television shows, including Akeelah and the Bee, Barbershop 2: Back in Business, True Jackson, VP, and CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story. "Theater offers so much more than I haven't been able to access doing film and TV and everything like that," she said. "I'm very excited to learn all that it has to offer — that focus and that dedication to perform at a certain level every night."
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Palmer said that as a young girl, she looked up to Brandy Norwood, who played Cinderella in the 1997 television movie. "I feel like the reason I'm able to do this is definitely because Brandy did it on TV," she said. "In me doing this, it shows everybody that everything is possible."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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