Interview: LACHANZE talks her Vivo Performing Arts Concert Debut

Five-time Tony Award-winning Broadway performer and producer LaChanze is headed to Boston to make her Vivo Performing Arts concert debut on Sunday, November 1, at Berklee Performance Center.

Winner of the 2006 Tony Award for Best Actress, Musical, for the role of Celie in the original Broadway production of “The Color Purple,” LaChanze’s performing career has seen her earn Tony nominations for her roles in “Once on This Island,” “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” and “Trouble in Mind,” written by her favorite playwright, Alice Childress. Her other Broadway credits include “Ragtime,” Dreamgirls,” “The Wiz,” “If/Then,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” and “Uptown... It’s Hot!”

In addition to dazzling audiences in book shows and concerts, LaChanze has also established herself as a significant force behind the scenes as a producer. In 2022, she made her producing debut with “Topdog/Underdog” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which together received 11 Tony Award nominations and six wins, including Best Revival of a Play and Best Musical. Her subsequent producing credits include “Here Lies Love,” “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” “The Outsiders,” “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Purpose,” “Other,” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”

Her producing work has earned her numerous Tony Award nominations and four additional wins across a range of productions. She also received a Primetime Emmy Award for her appearance with the Boston Pops in “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise.” Her screen credits include “By Any Means,” “The Help,” HBO’s “The Night Of,” and the television series “Law & Order: SVU,” “The Good Fight,” “Sex and the City,” and “The Blacklist.”

President of Black Theatre United, a community of creatives dedicated to awareness, accountability, and advocacy, the multi-hyphenate artist also launched LaChanze Productions in 2024, a company dedicated to “Making Broadway Cool” by discovering, developing, and delivering groundbreaking Broadway and commercial entertainment projects while nurturing emerging talent both on and off stage.

She is the proud mother of two, Grammy Award winner and Tony nominee Celia Rose, who appeared at the American Repertory Theater and on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre in “Jagged Little Pill” and is currently featured as Nyota Uhura in the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” and Zaya Gooding.

LaChanze was at her home office in Westchester County when she took time out recently to speak about her upcoming concert and more.

What do you have planned for your concert in Boston?

I’ll be exploring the rhythms of love, which is title of my show. As I see it, it is taking us through the journey of all of it, starting with music that explores the innocence of love, then the complexity of love, the challenges of love, the good, the bad, the ugly. I’ll be taking the audience all through the entire journey of it. The reason I decided to curate this concert for this time is because one of the things that people don’t realize about me is that I truly am a very optimistic, glass-half-full kind of person. Whenever I enter a room, I want to fill it with positive energy.

What kinds of music have you selected for this concert?

It’s a mixture. I am doing some of the Broadway canon and I’m also doing jazz.  Another reason I’m calling it “Rhythms of Love” is because those are two areas that I love the most, rhythm and love. And I’m putting the show together using a variety of rhythms. The songs that I’ve chosen are multi-rhythmic. Like, for instance, one of the songs is one we all know, but set to a samba beat. Many of the songs will be familiar, but the arrangements are in a new, different style of rhythm.

Will you be moving around on stage?

Oh, yes! That’s one of the issues I’m having right now, because the beautiful dress I’ve chosen for Boston doesn’t allow me to move much. I may have to rethink my outfit, because I love to move.

Do you see love solely through the prism of optimism?

Not really, I find humor in many situations, including failure in love. So there’s a lot of humor infused in my concert, and a lot of irony, too. It’s not just, “Oh, how wonderful it is to be in love!” It’s also how love makes us anxious and about the struggles we go through for it, and what it feels like to not find it.

That sounds fascinatingly complex. Tell me more?

I’m talking about love on all spectrums, not just romantic love, but love of self, love of things, love of life, and angry love as well.

Is there a particular song you’ll be performing that tells the story of love the way you see it?

When it comes to lost love, I’ll be doing “Losing My Mind” from “Follies,” one of my very favorite Stephen Sondheim songs. I put it in this concert because so many people have experienced waiting for the phone to ring, and it doesn’t. To me, “Losing My Mind” is one of Sondheim’s most brilliant compositions. It speaks directly to the insanity that we sometimes feel when we have unrequited love.

Have you done this concert previously?

This one I’m curating just for Boston, working with my director and longtime friend Jerry Dixon. We did “Once on This Island” and “If/Then” together, and I love working with Jerry in any way I can.

Will you be doing music from “The Color Purple”?

I used to always sing Celie’s act-two number, “I’m Here,” from “The Color Purple.” Most recently, however, I’ve stopped, because it’s such an extremely difficult song to sing and it tends to lean spiritual. In this particular concert, I want to focus on the irony. And so that song, out of context, sometimes tends to not be as celebratory as it is intended to be within the book show. I’ll sing it if people want to hear it, which they do sometimes, but in curating this show, I wanted to explore the humor and the intricacies of this journey that I’m taking the audience on, and it didn’t really fit.

What about other songs from Broadway shows you’ve been in?

I’ll be doing some songs that I’ve done on Broadway, for sure, just arranged differently.

You’ve played so many great roles in your career so far. Do you have a favorite?

It’s interesting because it’s not one of my famous roles. It was in a show entitled “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin,” from the play written by Kirsten Childs. We were supposed to go to Broadway but Disney had the rights and there was a change in leadership at Disney Theatricals, and we got shelved. But the musical remains my favorite.

The main character was a girl coming from California to be a dancer and work with Bob Fosse. She had this illusion of how the world saw her. She thought that she looked a certain way – bubbly and exciting. The show is so funny because it goes through all these ironic situations where she’s confronted with what really is happening in the world versus the fantasies in her mind about what the world is. The music is fantastic, and the story and characters are brilliant.

What interested you in becoming a producer?

Once you get to a certain age, you want to do more, and that’s why I started producing. I love acting and I love singing, but I felt that waiting for someone to pick me or cast me was wasting so much precious time in my life when I could be contributing to this industry that I love in a productive way. I wanted to use all the information and knowledge that I’ve gleaned over 40 years in this business to apply it from a producer’s seat. And it’s been helpful and informative. In fact, I think actors make great producers, because we’ve been in the center, the epicenter of the environment of theater.

What gives you more pleasure, performing or producing?

They both matter, so I want them both. But producing taps into my advocacy and aligns with where I feel I am today, advocating for artists who may not have an opportunity to get their work displayed. In that realm, there’s a wonderful musical called “The Apple Boys,” with music by Jonothon Lyons and music and lyrics by Ben Bonnema, that we’re developing right now for off-Broadway next spring. It’s about barbershop quartet singing and it takes place back in the heyday of Coney Island.

It’s wonderful and I’m so pleased to have been asked to join this team of young artists. If I can add my knowledge, wisdom, and expertise to it to hopefully help get a certain kind of attention for this project, I will be delighted, because it’s the kind of musical that anyone can see. It’s a love letter to New York and to Coney Island, and the barbershop quartet style of singing that has become almost a lost art. It’s a wholesome but very contemporary show.

Any other projects in the pipeline that you’d like to mention?

I own the rights to the Alice Childress play “Wine in the Wilderness,” which is set in Harlem in 1964, which I will be producing and directing at Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles at the end of this current theater season.  Alice Childress is not only my favorite playwright, she’s also an angel on my shoulder, and this is a play that she wrote in the late ’60s that I directed off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company in the spring of 2025. The artistic director of the Geffen saw that production and asked me if we would bring it to Los Angeles for their 2026–2027 season.