WASHINGTON POST
Just Call Them Divas Deluxe
Broadway Stars Gretha Boston and Vivian Reed Spice Up ‘3 Mo’ Divas’
By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 1, 2006;
Each of the two alternating casts of “3 Mo’ Divas,” the all-over-the-musical-map revue at Arena Stage through Aug. 13, has a diva among divas (and we mean that in a nice way) — a true showbiz veteran.
Vivian Reed gets audiences going with solo renditions of “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit” (with Andrea Jones-Sojola singing a wordless “Lament” as a descant), “Memory” and her writhing, funky-rhythmed, nearly NC-17-rated take on “Fever.” Reed also goes back to her classical roots with the aria “Pace, pace, mio Dio” from “La Forza del Destino.”
“You always have to go with what works,” Reed says. “It’s like the way I do ‘God Bless the Child.’ I don’t mess with that because I reinvented that when I did ‘Bubbling Brown Sugar.’ . . . If it works, it works.”
Solos are only part of “3 Mo’ Divas,” a crazy quilt of opera, Broadway, pop, jazz, blues, R&B and gospel. Reed’s co-stars are Jones-Sojola and Nina Negri.
“There are times you get together and you have group numbers and you better know how to blend. And I have a huge voice,” says the Pittsburgh-born contralto of the vocal gears she must shift during the show.
Reed, who began voice lessons at age 8, says she hits the C below middle C in “Strange Fruit” and can sing lower. After training at Juilliard, she began recording for pop labels, then starred on Broadway in the 1970s in “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” and “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” studied dance, toured, spent nearly a decade performing in Paris and returned to New York in the early 1990s.
“It has been an incredible life,” says Reed. Marriage and family weren’t on her agenda, though there have been proposals. “They said, ‘You know, Vivian, you have to give up your career’ . . . and I said, ‘Honey, you gotta get on the next thing smokin’, cause it ain’t gonna happen here.’ “
Reed calls her singing “my gift from God. I can’t even imagine myself not performing. I really can’t. It’s my passion. I wouldn’t care whether there was one person in that audience or 10,000.”
Tony winner Gretha Boston is a more reserved, slower-simmering singer. But in the second half of “3 Mo’ Divas” — the other two in this cast are Washington native Jamet Pittman and N’Kenge — Boston walks onstage, drops a feather boa onto the floor and orders it to “stay right there until I say move.” She eyeballs the audience and adds, “I treat it like I treat my men,” before launching into “Downhearted Blues.”
Boston solos on “Habanera” from “Carmen,” the bluesy lament “Mean to Me,” “Memory” and the spiritual “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
The Arkansas native won a 1995 Tony Award for her featured turn as Queenie in the Broadway revival of “Show Boat” and was nominated for her performance in “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues.” It was “Show Boat” that Boston says caused her to “jump ship” and leave her classical roots for musical theater.
She found the range of material in “Divas” daunting at first. “At one point, it’s just like your brain says, ‘No, don’t give me any more,’ ” chuckles Boston, who is not a trained dancer. “When you’re trying to learn the steps and trying to learn the music at the same time, it is a monster,” plus “you want to maintain some kind of a balance between the three women, so there’s still the responsibility of blend,” she explains.
Still, Boston adds, “It is nice to navigate your way through the whole evening, popping into one genre and into the next one.”
