Last week’s fifth annual Celebrity Charades tournament was a benefit for the LAByrinth Theater Company. It was also, according to Andre Royo—who plays the lovable snitch Bubbles on The Wire—a bit too white. The teams were divided into “good” and “evil,” and it just so happened that Royo, along with three other people of color—LAB’s John Ortiz, Yul Vasquez, and Craig “muMs” Grant—ended up on an evil team. “They always put the black man on the evil team,” Royo (sort of) jokes. His team lost. Why? He thinks the clues (among them, the song “Piano Man” and the musicals Cabaret and My Fair Lady) weren’t black enough. “There were no hip-hop songs. There were no urban movies. There were no urban plays,” says Royo. “I wanted Dreamgirls.” (“Get Up, Stand Up” was one of the clues. But the team of Noah Emmerich, Bob Balaban, George Wendt, Richard Kind, and Aasif Mandvi, who is Indian-American, didn’t get it.) “We did the best that we could do,” Royo says. “But the white team—I mean the right team—won.” Says a LAB spokesperson, “I think Andre just hadn’t played charades before.”
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