Tony-Winning actress is back after a 15-year intermission
NEW YORK — Heather Headley wants to make one thing clear: She never abandoned Broadway.
Sure, she won a Tony Award and then stepped away for 15 years.
She wanted a music career — growing up, she had dreamed of being Whitney Houston — so she recorded albums and toured the globe, winning a Grammy and performing with Andrea Bocelli.
She wanted a family, so she moved back to the Midwest, married a friend from college, had children and made a home.
But the gravitational pull of the stage was strong. And now, the woman who in her 20s arrived on Broadway as a lioness in “The Lion King” and dazzled theatergoers as a captive princess in “Aida” is back at 41, playing the nightclub singer Shug Avery in a revival of “The Color Purple.”
“I didn’t know how much I missed it,” she said, sitting in a spare dressing room backstage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater one afternoon before a show. On a rack hung Shug’s sultry dresses; on a shelf, pictures of Headley’s family; and on a bulletin board, encouraging notes from fans and colleagues, including Jennifer Hudson, whom Headley succeeded in the role.
Being in the show has reminded her of how much she appreciates portraying a character and joining a cast.
“When you’re doing your own concerts, it’s you — I’m up there as Heather, going out there as myself — but there’s just something amazingly special about getting dressed every night and saying, all right, well, Shug did that, not me,” she said. “And also, being a part of this kind of camaraderie.”
Headley has been easing her way back into theater over the last few years. In 2012, she temporarily moved to London to originate the leading role in a musical adaptation of “The Bodyguard” — a role made famous on film by Houston — with Broadway hopes that did not materialize. (“That part of it was a little disappointing,” she said. “However, I know that this is New York City, and if the show is not ready for it, I know what you guys do over at The Times.”)
Then, last summer, she starred as the witch in a production of “Into the Woods” at the Muny in St. Louis. (“I’m scared of Sondheim — I am very major chord — but it was an amazing experience.”)
“Truth be told, I decided years ago not to call it a job, because I know people who work — my mother worked, hard,” she said. “This is natural to me.” And then, dropping her voice to a whisper as she talked about the producers of “The Color Purple,” she added, presumably joking, “Do not tell Scott Sanders. Do not tell Oprah. But I’d do it for free. It’s natural to what I do, so I can’t call that work.”
Headley, who, like Shug Avery, is the daughter of a preacher, is a churchgoing Christian who prays before each show and wears crosses in her ears. She took the role of Shug, a woman whose sexual appetites make her an object of derision, as well as desire, only after consulting with her pastor in Wheaton, Ill., which is a center of American evangelicalism.
But Headley said she had come to love and respect her character. “Every night, I kind of take a moment when they say that even her daddy thinks she’s dirty — it breaks my heart,” she said. “On the inside, she’s incredibly broken, like so many of us,” she added. “With that said, she is closer to me than maybe I thought, because we’re all broken.”
Her portrayal is strikingly different from Hudson’s. “She definitely added an element of realism,” said Isaiah Johnson, the actor who plays Mister. And the show’s director, John Doyle, said, “She’s brought a kind of fierceness and maturity to the role.”
“I’ve worked with many of the great Broadway artists — Patti and Chita and Bernadette and Faith — and I would put Heather in that group,” Doyle said.
Headley has long loved storytelling by song. Born and raised initially in Trinidad, she grew up with Bollywood films, as well as “The Sound of Music.” (“Still, there’s this huge part of me that wants to be Maria one day,” she said. “I want to be the first black Maria, just for one night.”) Her family immigrated to Fort Wayne, Ind., and it was there, at Northrop High School, that she discovered musical theater, performing in “Camelot” and “Man of La Mancha” before landing the title role in “Funny Girl” (yes, she played Fanny Brice).
While studying at Northwestern, she was cast as Audra McDonald’s understudy in a pre-Broadway production of “Ragtime,” in Toronto, and while there, Disney came calling, offering her a role in a pre-Broadway production of “The Lion King,” in Minneapolis. She never returned to school.
“She’s gorgeous, has the most astounding voice, and even as a young girl, right out of college, had moral authority,” said Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Group. Schumacher was so impressed with Headley’s work as Nala, the lioness, on Broadway, that he cast her in the title role for the company’s next musical, “Aida.”
She won the Tony for “Aida” at 26 and then left the production to sing full-time.
“The Color Purple” is her first Broadway show in which she is neither starring nor originating a role — she is a replacement cast member, currently committed only through Labor Day. But she says being a supporting player brings its own pleasures, and she has viewed herself as like a big sister to Cynthia Erivo, who just won a Tony Award for her starring role as Celie, and Danielle Brooks, who was nominated for a Tony for her featured role as Sofia.
She is determined to bring her A-game, no matter the role, saying, “I owe it to my Tony.” Otherwise, she joked, she might offend the ghost of Antoinette Perry, the actress for whom the Tonys are named. “Antoinette herself might come back and be like, ‘I’m just taking this back from you now.’”