LaChanze first stepped onto a Broadway stage in 1990 in the musical “Once on This Island” and lost no time launching a career that hasn’t slowed down since. Then in her 20s, she received Tony and Drama Desk award nominations for her performance as Ti Moune, a peasant girl on a tropical island.
LaChanze will step onto a stage in the Hamptons for the first time on Monday, when she will bring her Feeling Good tour to Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. During the intervening years she won a Tony for the role of Celie in the original staging of “The Color Purple,” an Emmy for her performance in PBS’s “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise,” and shared the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture for “The Help.”
LaChanze is writing a memoir that spans her career. “Most of the responses to the excerpts I’ve released so far have been about how empowering and inspirational my life story is. What I hope to do with this show is put my entire journey thus far into song.”
The Feeling Good tour, which debuted at the Highline Ballroom in New York City in 2017, has evolved over the years. “You find out what works better for different audiences. I like to play for my audience, so the Bay Street performance will be specific to the Sag Harbor audience.”
“There will be a lot of familiar music — some Peter Gabriel, some traditional standards, and I’m going to throw in a few songs I haven’t included in the show so far. It will be a combination of my Feeling Good tour and my cabaret work as well. I hope it will be moving as well as fun and uplifting.”
In 2018, LaChanze returned to Broadway as Diva Donna in “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” for which she received Tony and Drama League nominations for best actress in a musical. Of that performance, The New York Times critic Jesse Green wrote, “LaChanze is incapable of musical insincerity, however insincere the script may be, and delivers the songs thrillingly.”
Her Bay Street show follows on the heels of her performance in Lynn Nottage’s Broadway musical “The Secret Life of Bees,” which ended a limited engagement on July 21. That play is going to London at the end of the year, and LaChanze is planning to go there with it, “but it will depend on what’s happening in my career at that time.”
Of Feeling Good, she said, “Honestly, I would love to tour with just my show. It’s basically a one-woman musical, with a lot of text as well as song, so I’d love to sit down with it somewhere and run it for a while and really polish it. But I’m also working on getting my next television role and taking a break from theater for a while.”
Tickets to the 8 p.m. show range from $79 to $125.
All-Intern Production
Bay Street will present “Incognito,” a play by Nick Payne that is produced, directed, designed, and acted entirely by the theater’s summer interns, from next Thursday through Aug. 10.
Four actors play 21 characters in the play, whose three interwoven stories involve a pathologist who steals the brain of Albert Einstein, a neuropsychologist who has her first romance with another woman, and a seizure patient who forgets everything except how much he loves his girlfriend.
Show times for the three performances are 4 p.m., and tickets will be sold as pay-what-you-can at the box office.