Top 12 Notable Performers 2010
Arturo Fernandez
Theatre Visionary Award
Arturo Fernandez
"Season of the Arts" Top 20 Under 40 2010
Arturo Fernandez
Ground Up & Rising's First Short Feature Film "Observe"
was honored as an official selection of 2010 Cannes Film Festival
Best Show/Director/Actor You Didn’t See 2009
“For the second year in a row, the winning entry comes from
Ground Up and Rising, the shoestring troupe in Miami that
mounted the stunning On an Average Day; also home to the best acting
and direction you didn't see awards, both going to Arturo Fernandez.”
- - Bill Hirschman, Sun-Sentinel (The best and worst on South Florida stages in '09)
Best of Miami - Best Actor
2009
Meshaun Labrone Arnold
“Meshaun
Labrone Arnold both wrote and starred in The Hate
U Gave,
but the piece had little of the self-indulgent flab
most writer/actors can't bring themselves to shear
from their own work. His acting and writing were
wise, while his subject – and character –
was just a savant: a man who saw the whole world
clearly except for his own place in it. Watching
Arnold, as Tupac, rage against the chasms that divide
us (by gender, class, or anything else, but especially
by race) – even as he bore helpless witness
to his own inability to do anything but widen
them
– was to see right into the hidden heart of
alienation. Arnold's tense,
kinetic body and tortured
face were pictographs, notating its cost.
- Brandon K. Thorp, Miami
New Times ("Best of Miami 2009")
Best of Miami - Best Supporting
Actress 2009
Lela Elam
“This award
could easily have gone to a dozen other actors from
Judas Iscariot, whose characters were as big, bright,
and sharply drawn as only a three-hour play with
an almost perfect cast can allow. But Lela Elam
brought it with an intensity rare even for her (which
is saying something), as she played both an eternally
grieving mother and Saint Monica. Her mother bit
was moving, subtle, fragile, almost silent, but
her Saint Monica was another thing entirely. Monica
was the driving force of the play – an enactment
of a long-overdue trial for Judas Iscariot, begun
because Monica believes Iscariot got a bad rap –
and she was entirely credible: a personality of
such blazing force that you figure, yeah, she could
totally reverse a divine judgment. In a single breath,
she was bawdy in an entirely 21st-century, hip-hop
kind of way; hilarious; trenchant; and scary. It
was a hard part that Elam handled with relish. An
actress this good probably has a difficult time
finding roles worth sinking her teeth into. Thank
heavens for Guirgis.
- Brandon K. Thorp, Miami
New Times ("Best of Miami 2009")
Best of Theater
2008
“The Hate U Gave at Ground Up & Rising in Miami... Meshaun Labrone Arnold's
performance as doomed rapper Tupac Shakur was mesmerizingly profane and threatening,
seductive and sophisticated. Arnold's bare-bones script was immeasurably elevated
by Arturo Fernandez's imaginative staging:
a fantasia of obscenity-laced raps and
rants examining the good
intentions, tragic results and destructive hypocrisy
living at the
intersection of race, art and pop culture.”
- Bill Hirschman, Sun sentinel (South Florida's 2008 theater season's most memorable moments)
Best of Classical
Music 2008
“Project Copernicus joined the acting troupe Ground Up & Rising in
an affecting commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War..”
- Miami Herald staff report (The year in review:Classical Music)
Best of Miami - Best Supporting
Actor 2008
Sheaun McKinney
“Sheaun McKinney
is a cute, cute kid. If there were a "menace
scale" for actors, he'd rate somewhere between
Andrea McArdle and Haley Joel Osment. At least,
that's how it went until you caught him in Jesus
Hopped the "A" Train. For ever after,
when you saw him on the sidewalk, you made sure
to cross the street. In Jesus, McKinney played a
prison guard who was either psychotic or principled,
depending on what moral perspective you brought
to the show. He thought his inmates were scum, and
he treated them as such. Even when Bechir Sylvain,
who played a serial killer turned deeply peaceable
spiritual guru, was trying to inspire his fellow
inmates with righteous, well-meaning pep talks,
McKinney was there to rub his face in shit. He seemed
to enjoy it. For a great many nervous moments, one
suspected McKinney really wanted nothing more than
to drag his costars out behind the theater and shoot
them. The hell of it is, his convictions were so
firmly held and so ardently conveyed that you almost
wanted it too.
- Brandon K. Thorp, Miami
New Times ("Best of Miami 2008")
Best of Theater
2007
“After watching his turn as a puling slave in the excruciating House with
No Walls, wethought we had Sheaun McKinney figured. He was a cute,
skinny kid, good for grabbingthe heartstringsand little else. Our mistake.
As a prison guard named Vasquez inGround Up & Rising's Jesus Hopped
the A-Train, he wasn't onstage a minute before the mean temperature in the auditorium dropped 10 degrees. He didn't want to rough up his charges, as the script might have suggested; he wanted to kill them. That desire, unspoken
and undeniable, was almost certainly the actor'sown innovation.
At least when he was onstage, McKinney really was full of hate,
inspiring in viewers a creepinguneasiness and a sense
they were sitting too close to an explosion waiting to happen.
- Brandon K. Thorp, Miami New Times (2007: The Moments in Review)
Best of Performing Arts in 2006
“Small companies made a big artistic impact in 2006,
demonstrating yet again that talent, taste and creativity can
compensate for meager funding. Standout companies included …
Miami's Ground Up & Rising ….”
- Christine Dolen, Miami Herald Theatre Critic
