NEWSIES Star Capathia Jenkins Brings MORE WOMAN THAN YOU KNOW to Garner Tonight

Capathia Jenkins will perform "More Woman Than You Know" tonight, January 31 at 7:30 pm at Garner Performing Arts Center, 742 W. Garner Road, Garner, NC. For tickets and information, call 919.661.4602.

Capathia Jenkins can't tell you what Newsies got right, but every night after the final curtain of the Broadway show she was overwhelmed by the audience's reaction to the story of a newspaper boys' strike.

"I have never received so much fan mail," said Jenkins, who is bringing her one-person show to the Garner Performing Arts Center on Jan. 31 as part of the Broadway Voices concert series.

The show had the same plot as a 1992 Disney movie of the same name that flopped. But the play ran for two years on Broadway, received eight Tony nominations and is now touring nationally with a stop scheduled for June at the Durham Performing Arts Center.

Jenkins saw a excerpt on television from the musical version produced at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Milburn, N.J. The song and dance number struck a chord. "Something was right. The energy. The love. Something," she said.

She was startled when she was invited to join the cast when the show moved to the Nederland Theater on Broadway. "Those boys could dance. What did they want me for?" she recalled.

The boys needed a mother figure, a mother figure that could really sing. That was Jenkins.

"I think they got the story right in the play," she said. "It touched people. Here were these young boys taking on the biggest media people of the day. They were the underdogs sticking up for what was right. "It really touched people and they loved it."

Jenkins already was an established Broadway performer known for evoking passion when she joined Newsies.

She made her Broadway debut in Frank Wilhorn's The Civil War. She played Harriett Jackson, a servant in the White House. Each night Jenkins provided an emotional highlight when she sang, "A Candle in the Window," a song about Abraham Lincoln praying about the fate of the nation by candlelight.

She has credits in five Broadway shows and is known as a versatile performer.

In a span of a few months she will take a role in The Colored Museum in Boston and perform with symphonies throughout the country and Europe doing various rock, jazz, soul and Broadway presentations, plus an international series of concerts of the music of the James Bond films.

"She can sing anything," said Ron Bohmer, her James Bond and a former Broadway Phantom who also appeared in Broadway Voices. "She has this tremendous voice and pulls the audience in."

Jenkins plans a compilation of styles for her Capathia Jenkins: More Woman Than You Know program in Garner.

"People see me in a show or a concert and they think they know me. They don't," she said. "This show was put together so that I could share my life and my music."

She grew up singing in the church, is classically trained, majored in jazz performance in college, loves soul music and is a Broadway performer. "I like to sing it all," she said. "If you don't like the one that I'm singing now, hold on, the next one is going to be different."

Norm Lewis, the current Broadway Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, recommended Jenkins to Neal Padgett, a producer of Broadway Voices.

When Lewis walked onto the Garner stage for a sound check before his Broadway Voices performance, he turned to Padgett and said, "You've got to get Capathia Jenkins here. She is incredible and I can just feel her in the room. You really have to get her here. She is tremendous."

After Jenkins was invited to Broadway Voices for this season, she called Lewis.

"He told me that it was a wonderful place, a wonderful audience and that it would be a wonderful experience," Jenkins said.

Click here to purchase tickets online or call 919.661.4602 (Mon-Fri, 1:30 - 5:00 pm).