Some actors are 90% voice and 6, maybe 7% something else. And that’s why they don’t add up. Colman Domingo? Not one of those actors.
An Oscar nominee last year for his full-bodied turn as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in “Rustin,” and star of the very fine new film “Sing Sing,” Domingo could get by, probably, on his basso profondo speaking voice alone. But he doesn’t. He’s doing too much beyond it to make you believe who he’s playing, in moments of anguish, joy, volatility or stillness.
Take 2020, that lousy first COVID year. After many years of doing August Wilson’s plays all over the country, Domingo took on the role of Cutler, the easy-does-it session musician working alongside Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in the Netflix adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” That same year, in the jaw-dropper of a road trip odyssey “Zola,” Domingo anchored the craziness as the shape-shifting sex trafficker with more shades to his persona than most actors could manage convincingly in an entire career.
In “Sing Sing” the Philadelphia native plays John “Divine G” Whitfield, the real-life, self-described jailhouse lawyer who provided an early spark for New York State’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts prison program. While wrongly incarcerated, Whitfield performed Shakespeare and wrote his own plays in between advocating for other men up for parole and some — like himself — facing decades more of the life they’re living. “Sing Sing” .