Picture: Geraint Lewis
Black Is The Color of My Voice continues at The Vaults, London until 13 July 2019.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Actress-writer Apphia Campbell has created a remarkable picture of the early part of the legendary Nina Simone’s troubled life without one mention of Simone’s name in this breathtaking 70-minute one-woman show at The Vaults.
Instead, Campbell calls the outspoken civil rights campaigner Mena Bordeaux for the purposes of this hard-hitting musical play she wrote six years ago and premiered in Shanghai before taking it to the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
London and the South saw it before this two-week run in the bowels of Waterloo Station – at the Trafalgar Studios, St James’s Studio, Wilton’s Music Hall and Oxford Playhouse – and this powerful piece of theatre deserves to be seen.
The sixth of eight born to a poor family in North Carolina, Simone was child prodigy as a pianist good enough to play the Carnegie Hall but suffered rejection from auditions and the musical college she wanted to attend, not for lack of ability but because of her colour. Or that’s how she saw it. And she never let the world forget it.
Campbell is a stunning talent with a wonderfully resonant speaking voice that means not a word is lost even when trains rumbled overhead, plus a haunting singing voice uncannily close in tone and timbre to the lady who inspired her.
The actress illustrates her story by singing the songs that made Simone’s name including a gorgeous treatment of the Gershwins’ ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ which Simone took into the pop charts, ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ (Walter Donaldson/Gus Kahn) and ‘I Put a Spell On You’, the Jay Hawkins title song of her 1965 album.
But it was Simone’s own violent composition ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination” in 1963 following the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama which killed four young girls, that truly caught the effect she had on America’s Impoverished, rebellious Deep South.
The African-American folk chant ‘See-Line Woman’ was another staple of Simone’s act and Campbell got full impact singing a cappella to her father’s photo ‘Black is the Colour (of My True Love’s Hair)’, a folk song from the Appalachians that originated in Scotland.
Having more than a passing resemblance to Simone helps in creating the character of this outrageously gifted genius for whom the word “difficult” was as polite as you could be about her.
As we see in Campbell’s beautifully written show, if you caught Simone on a good day, she was magic. But heaven help anyone who dared talk while she was performing. She was not averse to closing the piano lid and walking off even if only a couple of songs into her set.
I was there one night at Ronnie Scott’s when she did just that, but when she played the Royal Albert Hall in front of an audience of 3,000, she was ultra-professional and fabulous, even managing the odd smile.
She shot a neighbour’s son because his laughter was affecting her concentration and tried to kill a record company executive she thought was cheating her out of royalties. Haughty and confrontational with a huge chip on her shoulder, she was not a lady to be trifled with.
Florida-born Campbell embraces every facet of Simone, even down to a wicked impersonation of her mother while jumping up and down on the bed, one of the few props, along with a few Nina headbands and a framed photo of her father, on the very basic set.
Directed by Arran Hawkins and Nate Jacobs, this was a hypnotic, immersive, emotional evening that was over all too soon, well worth seeing and seeing again. Brava Apphia!
Jeremy Chapman
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