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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Lifestyle
Nick Curtis

The Hot Wing King at the National Theatre review: a tasty, stimulating experience

Writer Katori Hall won the Pulitzer Prize for this entertaining and humane 2020 story of four queer black men prepping for a hot wing competition in Memphis, Tennessee.

It won’t win her any awards for brevity, though: Roy Alexander Weise’s full-throated production clocks in at 165 minutes, with arguments repeatedly reheated, recipes rehashed and the N-word splashed around like hot sauce. It’s acted with strident passion and emphatic accents (“damn” is rendered “DAY-AM-UH”) by the six-strong cast, but it could do with a tough edit.

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