Training for a Lifetime for the Role of Pearl Bailey

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Ever since singer-actress Roz White found out she shared a birthday (March 29) with Pearl Bailey, she's felt a kinship with the legendary performer. "I thought, wow, we look alike . . . so I started reading her books and learning her quotes," White says. Bailey, who died in 1990, also spent part of her childhood in Washington, where White grew up.

"She could work a ballad like the best of 'em. She just was the completely well-rounded entertainer. . . . She had it all," observes White, who is starring in a cabaret-style salute, "Pearl Bailey . . . by Request," at MetroStage in Alexandria tomorrow through Nov. 9. The show is an expanded version of a piece White performed at THEARC in Anacostia, now co-written with the show's director, Thomas W. Jones II.

White says she aims to become Bailey "top to bottom" at MetroStage. "I don't want you to think for one moment that you're watching Roz," she says. "I chose not to portray her in her latter years. I chose to portray her in her prime, with a fabulous gown, fabulous hair . . . to show you exactly what it looked like then."

White lived and performed in New Orleans for several years, returning to Washington after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, MetroStage has been a frequent artistic home. She played Alberta Hunter in "Bricktop" and appeared in "Two Queens One Castle" and "Three Sistahs." She won a 1996 Helen Hayes Award for her work in Jones's "Bessie's Blues" at Studio Theatre.

"Pearl Bailey . . . by Request" is based in part on an album Bailey recorded for Columbia Records in the 1950s. Songs such as "St. Louis Blues," "Legalize My Name" and "Takes Two to Tango" are interwoven with Bailey's trademark patter. "Pearl has so many built-in monologues to her songs that hardly any writing needed to be done" for the show, White notes.

As a teen, White says, she preferred listening to her grandmother's LPs of Bailey, Sarah Vaughn and Bessie Smith rather than to contemporary singers of her youth, such as Michael Jackson. She was drawn to the spotlight even as a tot. When she was 3 and 4 years old, she would push aside kids with stage fright and step in for them at little school shows, White's mother reminds her. She attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, then earned a degree from Howard University's musical theater program, studying with the fabled Mike Malone at both schools. At Howard, she created a solo piece about Bailey, Vaughn, Smith, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Nancy Wilson. "As the years went on," White says, "I started to chip away at the piece and focus on one woman" -- Bailey.

The show touches on some of the controversies in Bailey's life. Her long marriage to jazz drummer Louis Bellson, who is white, drew criticism from both sides of the racial divide. A 1946 Broadway show, "St. Louis Woman," in which she starred, offended the NAACP. White says Bailey, who was a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and in 1988 was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, took a broader view.

"She believed in human beings first, and love was our bond," White says. "It sounds like a cliche now, but she really believed it."

Getting Down in Prague

Playwright Norman Allen had to get in touch with his inner melodramatist to write the script for the new musical "Carmen: Viva Amor!"

You won't catch this "Carmen," very loosely based on the seductress of Prosper Merimee's 1846 novella and Bizet's opera, on Broadway or in a Washington theater. You'd have to go to Prague, where it is having its world-premiere run -- in Czech, with English surtitles -- at the Karlin Theatre.

Allen was introduced to Broadway composer Frank Wildhorn ("Jekyll & Hyde," "The Civil War," "Dracula") a few years ago by Signature Theatre's Eric Schaeffer. They agreed they should collaborate on the right project one day. That turned out to be a commission Wildhorn received from the Karlin (where his "Jekyll & Hyde" had a long run) to do a contemporary take on the "Carmen" story.

"It was never going to be a period piece," Allen says; Wildhorn "envisioned a sort of Gypsy Kings, salsa, sexy score." After many permutations during a three-year process, the story has been transferred to a modern, unnamed Latin country. Carmen performs with a traveling circus (complete with caged lions); Jose is a policeman who abandons his fiancee for her.

As the book writer (Jack Murphy wrote the lyrics to Wildhorn's music), Allen's job was to come up with the structure of the show. He created outlines, "then I wrote the script, including monologues where I thought songs should go. Then Frank and Jack took the monologue and put a song [there]," he says.

The Prague producers nudged him into a more overtly passionate style. As the author of "Nijinsky's Last Dance," "In the Garden," "Fallen From Proust" and "Melville Slept Here" -- all Washington area premieres -- Allen was no stranger to drama, but he wasn't comfortable with the romance-novel emotion the producers wanted.

There were "many pints of Pilsner, and we really argued it out . . . I kept fighting it, because it's not something we see in the United States anymore -- maybe in some Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff," Allen says, but his agent urged him to agree. "At that point, I kind of let go and listened to my inner melodrama."

Now he thinks those producers "were absolutely right. It absolutely works."

The show opened early this month, and now Allen is back in Washington, where he heads the English department at Cesar Chavez Charter School for Public Policy. His two careers seem to give his life balance. "One, as exciting as it is, is not going to change the world," he says, "and then I get to come back and do something that really means something."

Earlier this year, after seeing a performance of a family play Allen had written, a student looked at his teacher with surprise and said, "Mr. Allen -- you got skills!"

Follow Spots

· The Helen Hayes Awards will hold its annual auction Friday at the Four Seasons Hotel, to help fund educational programs to create new -- and especially young -- theatergoers. Former Post columnist Bob Levey will be auctioneer and WTOP's Bob Madigan will emcee. Visit http://www.helenhayes.org or call 202-337-4572.

· The Contemporary American Theater Festival, based in Shepherdstown, W.Va., will hold a fall benefit Saturday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. Dramatist Lydia R. Diamond, whose "Stick Fly" was done at the festival this summer, will read excerpts from her works at 102 E. German St. in Shepherdstown, with receptions before and after the performance. Tickets are $40. Call 304-876-3304 or e-mail lcobetto@shepherd.edu.