EXCLUSIVE: Marcus Callender, best known for starring in Power and Wu-Tang: An American Saga, is taking his Spades: The Play on a national tour.

The stage play is set to run 76 performances across Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans and Miami this fall, following a four-week debut run in Harlem last November.

“I consider Spades: The Play a love letter to us and to the culture. I spent ten years writing this play, with love, care and intention poured into every word,” the director and playwright says. “Taking it on tour and bringing it directly to the people is exactly what it was created for.”

He continued, “Great theater doesn’t have to exist within the walls of traditional confines — it comes from raw storytelling and relatable experiences that can live anywhere. I had the exciting opportunity to shape what theater looks and feels like for the culture, on our own terms and to me, that’s the future of theater.”

Set in 2013 Harlem, and based on true events in Callender’s life, Spades: The Play follows a close-knit group of twenty-somethings as they gather for their weekly spades game at a friend’s house. As the cards are dealt, playful banter turns to honest conversation about love, friendship, and the blurred lines between the two. The production stars Broderick Clavery (Extrapolations) as “Gill” and Akilah A. Walker (The Chi) as “Cori,” with Derrick Alexander as “Andre” and Erin Nicole Washington as “Nefertiti.”

The tour kicks off with an exclusive one-night-only performance at the historic Studio Museum in Harlem on September 3.

Each stop on the tour is hosted at a culturally centric venue. The run includes Culture House DC, a former Black church dating to the 1800s; Cam Kirk Studios in Atlanta; Wendy Raquel Robinson’s Amazing Grace Conservatory in Los Angeles; and Fire House Loft in New Orleans. It closes in Miami during Art Basel.

Spades: The Play Tour Dates

September 9-20: Washington, D.C. (Culture House DC)

September 23-October 18: Los Angeles, California (Amazing Grace Conservatory)

October 21-November 15: Atlanta, Georgia (Cam Kirk Studios)

November 18-29: New Orleans, Louisiana (Fire House Loft)

December 2-6: Miami, Florida

Tickets are available exclusively through Posh.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published on March 7, 2025 out of the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Neon will release the film in theaters on Friday, August 21.

The crafty but ultimately disappointing “It Ends,” which premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, takes a familiar experience and throws into a cleverly existential horror premise: What if you were driving on a deserted, tree-lined road in the middle of the night — an already eerie scenario that plenty of filmmakers have used to freak people out — but the road just never ended? What if you just kept going and going for thousands of miles?

There are moments throughout Alexander Ullom’s debut feature that are genuinely unnerving, as four 20-somethings try to figure out just what the hell is going on from the confines of their white Jeep. Ullom uses the car’s features to his advantage, mining the uncomfortable glow of flashing hazard lights and the incessant beeping of an open door, for tension. 

But while the movie is often cleverly spooky, it falls short in finding meaning in its fun gimmick of a setup. By the time “It Ends,” well, ends, you end up wondering: So, that’s it? What once felt fruitful just becomes set up for a gotcha punchline that seems to laugh in the face of anyone actually invested in the story.

For a while though, “It Ends” is a fun ride. It opens from what is essentially the perspective of the vehicle where nearly all the action will take place, establishing the SUV as an almost sentient figure. Four pals climb into it. There’s the driver (Mitchell Cole), a taciturn dude with a thick Southern accent who spent some time in the military. He’s chauffeuring James (Phinehas Yoon), a cynic about to start a boring job, Day (Akira Jackson), a graphic design major uncertain about her future, and the goofy Fisher (Noah Toth). They are all old friends on the cusp of entering the real world. Post-grad malaise is a key theme here, as their trip soon comes to represent the what am I doing with my life fears of many in that age range. 

Ullom, I suspect, is purposely coy about just where they are all going, because the destination ends up not really being the point. Day uses her phone to navigate from the backseat when she tells Tyler to take a turn that will eventually lead to a highway. But the highway never comes, the map stays fixed on the two lane stretch, and slowly they all realize something is very wrong. Their conversations turn from the kind of surface-level banter you have with high school buddies into genuine terror. 

These early moments of confusion are where Ullom’s filmmaking is at its flashiest and most exciting. We are with James as he peers out into the tree lined woods, seeing something move in the flashes of red light coming from the briefly stopped car. The fear is palpable as you try to discern just what kind of movie these four pals are in: Is it a zombie flick? Or something else? 

But the set up for “It Ends” also becomes its Achilles’ Heel. The group quickly comes to understand that in order to stay alive they must keep their car on and keep driving. Obvious questions that situation elicits are explained away with a proverbial wave of the hand: Staying on the road means they never get hungry or tired. (They also never seem to have to go to the bathroom, which is not addressed, but something I thought about.) They can take brief breaks that they time on their phones, which seem to never lose power even though they get internet service. 

The rules of the journey are both simple but sometimes mean that you, as a viewer, are trying to find the holes whatever supernatural curse has descended upon the protagonists. (Can’t their phones play music? Or do college kids not download music to their phones anymore?)

It also results in a monotony that Ullom can’t quite overcome. Yes, the repetitive nature of this adventure is sort of the point in this Gen Z “No Exit,” but eventually it starts to weigh the plot down and you long for some sort of revelation. Sartre, this is not. 

The characters simply aren’t developed enough to make their slow unraveling all that captivating. Ullom does the work of establishing their banter, but not their deeper relationships. Despite some moments of confession we never really get a great sense of who these people were before their ordeal or what they mean to each other. Yoon gets the most to do as James becomes more and more obsessed with figuring it all out while his companions have resigned themselves to their fate, and yet he remains entirely defined by his circumstances in a way that makes him more representative than human.

As “It Ends” draws to its conclusion it starts to naggingly feel like an experiment that bleeds into a little bit of a “fuck you” to its audience. There’s an intriguing nihilistic streak to the whole affair, but what comes before isn’t funny or insightful enough to warrant what is ultimately served up. It’s just sort of a joke on you for caring. And maybe that’s what the youth are al about. 

Grade: B-

“It Ends” premiered at SXSW 2025.

Myles Bullock Be is ready for some peepin’ and some creepin’ as he has nabbed the role of Dr. Dre in Snoop, Universal Pictures’ biopic of entertainment mogul and music icon Snoop Dogg.

Craig Brewer is directing the feature, which is being produced by Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer, the veteran producer behind the semi-autobiographical Eminem drama 8 Mile, and the company’s Allan Mandelbaum. Snoop Dogg and Death Row Pictures president Sara Ramaker are also producing.

Jonathan Daviss, one of the stars of Netflix series Outer Banks, is portraying Snoop Dogg, who emerged from Long Beach, Calif. in the 1990s to become one of the biggest names in rap.

Key to his success was his relationship with Dre, one of the members of influential gangsta rap group N.W.A. In the early 1990s, as Dre made his seminal solo album The Chronic, he was given given a cassette of demo tracks featuring a young Snoop Dogg. He was impressed that he put Snoop Dogg on numerous tracks, including the mega-successful single ‘Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang.’

Dre became Snoop Dogg’s mentor and produced the latter’s debut album, Doggystyle, which is considered one of the key albums of 1990s.

Brewer, who recently directed Song Sung Blue for Universal’s specialty studio Focus Features, wrote the latest draft of the script, which was initially written by Joe Robert Cole. The feature will incorporate music from Snoop Doog’s vast catalogue.

Universal, which previously made 2015’s Oscar-nominated N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, will release Snoop on Aug. 6, 2027.

Imagine’s Jeb Brody is executive producing. Senior vp of production development Ryan Jones and director of development Tony Ducret are overseeing the project for the studio. 

For Bullock Be, Snoop reunites the actor with Brewer, who directed him in the 2024 Peacock mini-series Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, which had the actor part of an all-star cast that included Kevin Hart, Taraji P. Henson, and Samuel L. Jackson.

The actor appeared in 20^th Century’s White Men Can’t Jump and a did a stint on Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s hit Starz series BMF, and earlier on starred in Marvel series Runaways.

Bullock Be, repped by Independent Artist Group and Liberman-Zerman Management, is currently shooting Hulu’s Prison Break reboot Prison Break: Black Creek as a series lead.