Tag Archives: One Night in Miami

Kemp Powers’ play One Night in Miami has such a perfect premise that when he hit upon it, he must have hurtled towards his notebook or his laptop, desperate to get it on the page and the stage before anyone else. The big idea was to imagine what happened on 25 February 1964, when the 22-year-old Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston in Florida to become the world heavyweight boxing champion, and then met up with three close friends, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown. All four men were black American icons. All four were at turning points in their lives. Two of them would be murdered within the next year.