Tonywatch: Playwright Katori Hall ‘reaching for humanity’

By MARK KENNEDY
AP Entertainment Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Most playwrights who dip their toes into musical theater for the first time go small. Not Katori Hall. Her first assignment was to capture the life of musical giant Tina Turner. She says she wasn’t scared. That fearlessness has led to Hall’s first Tony nominations, as a producer and book writer for “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” While she had no experience in musical theater until “Tina,” she had written several plays and one on an icon. Hall’s “The Mountaintop” is a fictional drama centered on Martin Luther King Jr. Hall is also the creator and showrunner of Starz’s critical breakout “P-Valley.”