‘Power to the people’
Meet Laiona Michelle, who’s radicalizing the Goodspeed with Nina Simone musical ‘Little Girl Blue’
When Laiona Michelle walks onto the small stage in the giant outdoor tent where Goodspeed has been doing its shows all summer, she casts an eye on the audience: “Look at all these groovy white people! I can always count on you!”
Later, she leads that crowd in a chant of “Power to the People!”
Michelle is playing Nina Simone, the legendary singer/pianist who politicized pop music in the 1960s with her original civil rights anthems, as well as transformative covers of contemporary hits that hadn’t sounded important until she did them.
Or, as she announces, “Your High Priestess of Soul is here.”
Goodspeed Musicals has certainly done some politically provocative shows over the years, from “Zapata” to “Billy Elliot,” but “Little Girl Blue” is set up like a concert show and consciously blurs the lines between settled entertainment and an interactive theater experience.
“Little Girl Blue: The Nina Simone Musical,” running at the Goodspeed through Aug. 29, is an intimate two-act musical drama charting the highs and lows of
Simone’s blazing life and career.
Amid the many full-length songs, Michelle seeks to bring Simone personal drama to life. She points out notable people in the audience that aren’t really in this audience, like Miles Davis or Simone’s husband Andy Stroud.
Mid-show, when the musicians in the onstage band are introduced, it’s with the names of musicians Simone toured with, the characters these musicians are playing. The real performers are pianist Mark Fifer, drummer Kenn Salters and bassist Saadi Zain. Fifer, who’s also the show’s music director, handle most of Simone’s intricate keyboard work so that Michelle (who strikes the keys herself numerous times during the show) can move around.
Since it is still a work-in-progress, critics have not been invited to review “Little Girl Blue.” The show had a successful try-out at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey in early 2019, and a New York production is currently being negotiated. “We wanted one more out-of-town run before taking it to New York, and when the Goodspeed offered this to us it was just right,” Michelle says.
Some of Simone’s best-known songs (like “My Baby Don’t Care for Me” and “Mississippi Goddamn,” which are mentioned onstage but not performed) don’t make it into the show, either because they don’t fit the dramatic themes of this tightly scripted bio-musical or because the production was unable to license the rights to them. But so many Simone classics make the cut that there’s no room for disappointment, including her fiery rearrangements of “I
Put a Spell on You,” Van McCoy’s “Break Down and Let It All Out,” Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” and “I Got Life” from the musical “Hair” and even “My Way.”
There’s also the title song, a Richard Rodgers showtune from “Jumbo” that Simone alchemized with classical underpinnings and a haunting vocal.
When a more volatile song was needed to end “Little Girl Blue”’s first act, Michelle and music director Mark Fifer (who also plays piano in the
Simone style as a member of the onstage band) wrote their own, “Angry Young Woman,” and are writing another song which they may insert into the second act next week.
The Courant spoke to Laiona Michelle about how its time at Goodspeed has affected “Little Girl Blue.”
Q: Has she ever been in an audience where the “white people” line wouldn’t work?
A: No. But Nina reached so many people, it’s not shocking to me that there’d be large white audiences for her. They are ready for this. The audience here is so sophisticated. The material is ballsy at times. It can be provocative. I think the theater may have been concerned about a couple of things, but [Goodspeed Artistic Director] Donna Lynn Hilton really leaves the power to the artist. She’s also very aware of her audiences and what they’re like. You can see that people leave at the end feeling good.
Q: How does the Goodspeed engagement, in a tent by the river, differ from the New Jersey theater workshop?
A: “New Jersey had a big set, a rotating piano, but here it’s the bare minimum. There’s only one costume change. This is good for us. We can find out “Can the book stand on its own?” “Can we reach audiences without all the bells and whistles?”
Q: How did she decide on the structure of two Nina Simone concerts nearly a decade apart?
A: When I set out to write the show, it was about her great breakdowns, and one was when Martin Luther King died and she’d just had enough, wanted to leave the country. Then there was also her mental illness, and the abuse she endured. She lived through a lot. The big surprise is that all she really wanted to do was play Bach. When she started losing her skills, it destroyed her.”
Q: How did she find a band that could handle this?
A: Mark [Fifer] took all of that on. We knew we needed excellent players. They didn’t realize that they’d have to act! That came up during the workshops, when I realized it was terribly lonely not to be interacting with anyone else. Originally this started as a one-woman play. But even though I was playing Nina Simone, I knew I couldn’t just live there at the piano for the whole time. Throughout the workshop process, we had to keep asking “How do we make this reachable?”
Q: What have the music director, Mark Fifer, and the director, Devanand Janki, contributed?
A: I met Mark through Dev, and they asked me what I was working on. When I said it was a musical about Nina Simone they said “This has to go forward!” and I said, “Then you’re coming with me!” They are both all-thingsNina like me. We’re all very protective of her. Dev is so smart. He figured out how to lift it from the page and make it active.
Q: What else is going on for Laiona Michelle?
A: I’ve got another musical, about Nelson Mandela. It’s having its world in premiere in London next year.