How Ella Found Me
How Ella Found Me
Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, jazz wasn’t exactly on the menu.
The music that filled our home was Motown. After my grandmother passed away, my mother and father took in my uncles, who were still teenagers. And those uncles brought the Delfonics, the Stylistics, and all that wonderful music into our household.
Then there was Memphis, Tennessee, just down the road, and the unmistakable Stax sound.
We had Soul Train on television, of course. But on Saturday afternoons, we also had Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton.
Nashville is Music City, USA. Country music was everywhere. Whether you were looking for it or not, you were going to hear it.
But jazz?
Ella Fitzgerald?
Not so much.
It wasn’t until I was an adult living in New York City that Ella entered my life in a way I could never have imagined.
My dear friend and collaborator, the late, great Maurice Hines, asked me to write the libretto for a musical about Ella Fitzgerald. Maurice and I had worked together on other projects, and he knew my writing.
In 2003, Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., commissioned the project. Maurice had enjoyed a successful run of Guys and Dolls there, and now he wanted to develop a musical about Ella.
And he wanted me to write it.
Suddenly, I had homework.
I began researching Ella’s life, including a visit to the archives at Rutgers University. I remember speaking with a gentleman there about Ella, her manager Norman Granz, and her cousin Georgiana.
But I was searching for something very specific.
Where was the drama?
Ella had lived an extraordinary life, but hers wasn’t a biography filled with the sensational scandals that so often become the foundation of theatrical stories.
There wasn’t a notorious drug problem. There wasn’t a string of outrageous love affairs. Her public image was relatively clean.
And I wasn’t interested in inventing a scandal just to make a musical.
Then I discovered something about her family.
Ella had a half-sister named Frances.
And when Frances died, Ella was in the south of France recording with the legendary Duke Ellington.
There it was.
A woman facing profound personal loss while the demands of her extraordinary career continued.
The show must go on.
As a dramatist, I recognized the possibilities immediately. I could place the musical at that emotional crossroads, where private grief meets public responsibility.
But something was still missing.
Years later, around 2012, I was finally completing my undergraduate degree at SUNY Empire State College.
That’s another story in itself.
I had been a senior at Tennessee State University when show business called and took me out on the road. By the time I thought about returning to school, I was already living in New York and working on Broadway.
It took decades for me to slow down long enough to finish that degree.
While studying playwriting at SUNY Empire State, I gave my Ella script to my professor.
She read it and offered an observation that changed the musical.
If the emotional center of the story was Ella losing her sister, she explained, then the audience needed to get to know that sister. Otherwise, how could they fully experience the loss?
Well, of course.
So I added Frances as a character.
The fabulous Wynonna Smith originated the role, and Debra Walton later played Frances in subsequent productions.
Sometimes the most important dramaturgical discoveries are the ones that seem obvious once somebody points them out.
Eventually, I would return to graduate school to earn my MFA at NYU.
And I had a very particular reason for doing so.
I wanted to know what my literary heroes knew.
Writers like George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, and Ntozake Shange. I wanted to understand their command of dramatic structure, character, language, and storytelling. I wanted to study the craft that made their work so extraordinary.
But there’s an irony in that ambition that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until years later.
Meanwhile, another story had been unfolding.
Although Arena Stage commissioned Ella, the theatre ultimately decided not to move forward with producing it.
And that’s where Crossroads Theatre entered the picture.
Crossroads, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was one of the country’s most important African American regional theatres. In 1999, it became the first predominantly Black theatre company to receive the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.
Its history included work by some of the very writers I admired, including George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, and Ntozake Shange. Crossroads had also presented work by such extraordinary artists as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, as well as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
But by the early 2000s, Crossroads was facing serious financial difficulties.
What I didn’t know at the time was just how serious.
In 2004, Ella, First Lady of Song premiered at Crossroads Theatre, starring the extraordinary Freda Payne.
Freda, of course, had given the world the hit recording “Band of Gold.” But she also brought the vocal sophistication, musicality, and stage presence to take on the First Lady of Song.
And there we were, bringing Ella Fitzgerald’s life to the stage.
The production was a tremendous success.
But I wouldn’t learn the full significance of that success until nearly twenty years later.
In the meantime, Ella continued to find audiences.
We had a production at MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2014, followed by Delaware Theatre Company in Wilmington in 2018. A planned Houston production in 2020 was cancelled because of COVID.
Then came the Madison Theatre at Molloy College in 2022.
That production earned five AUDELCO Awards, including Best Musical, Best Director of a Musical for me, Best Lead Actress in a Musical for Freda Payne, Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Harriett D. Foy, and Outstanding Musical Director for Dionne Hendricks.
Nearly two decades after our premiere, we were still telling Ella’s story, and the work was still being recognized.
Then, in December 2023, we returned to Crossroads for an anniversary musical tribute starring Freda Payne.
I was serving as master of ceremonies that evening.
At one point, while I was standing in the wings, Crossroads’ artistic leadership and its board chairman emeritus addressed the audience.
And that’s when I heard something extraordinary.
They spoke about the financial difficulties Crossroads had faced back when Maurice brought Ella to the theatre. They explained that the company had been struggling to keep its doors open and had approached Maurice about bringing them a production that might help.
And they told the audience that the success of Ella had helped save Crossroads.
I stood there in the wings, hearing this story for the first time.
Nearly twenty years after our premiere, I was discovering something about the impact of our work that I hadn’t known when we created it.
And then came the irony.
I had spent years wanting to understand what my literary heroes knew. I had returned to school, eventually earning an MFA, to deepen my understanding of their craft.
Yet before I had even earned that MFA, something I had written had helped sustain the very theatre where the work of so many of those heroes had been presented.
George C. Wolfe.
August Wilson.
Ntozake Shange.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
I had been so focused on finding the drama in Ella Fitzgerald’s life that I hadn’t realized our musical had become part of another story entirely: the survival of an important African American theatrical institution.
And the journey continued.
In 2024, Ella, First Lady of Song traveled to Meadow Brook Theatre in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where I directed Freda Payne in another production.
From New Brunswick to Alexandria, Wilmington, Long Island, and Michigan, Ella’s story has continued to reach new audiences.
Today, when you search for an Ella Fitzgerald musical, our production has a prominent presence in the results. That’s gratifying, particularly when I remember that jazz wasn’t even part of my musical vocabulary growing up in Nashville.
We’re now working toward the next chapter.
Following Maurice’s passing, there are important matters to complete involving the chain of title, his estate, and the necessary music rights.
Our goal is to make Ella, First Lady of Song available for licensing to theatres around the world.
There’s still work to do.
But I often think about how this all began.
A young boy in Nashville, listening to Motown, Stax, the Delfonics, the Stylistics, Porter Wagoner, and Dolly Parton.
Jazz wasn’t on the menu.
Then, years later, Maurice Hines asked me to write a musical about a woman whose music would become part of my creative life for more than two decades.
I went looking for the drama in Ella Fitzgerald’s life.
And somewhere along the way, Ella became part of mine.
