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Tony- and Emmy Award- winning singer-actress LaChanze will return to Broadway this Fall in the starring role of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, to be directed by Charles Randolph-Wright.
The role will mark LaChanze’s Broadway return following her 2019 performance as the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol and, the year before, as one of three incarnations of the title character in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018), for which she received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.
The casting was announced today by Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s Artistic Director/CEO. Additional casting will be announced later.
Trouble in Mind will begin preview performances on Friday, October 29, and open officially on Thursday, November 18. The limited engagement runs through Sunday, January 9, 2022 at the American Airlines Theatre.
Childress’ groundbreaking play, which follows a Black stage actress through rehearsals of a major Broadway production, debuted Off Broadway in 1955 but a planned Broadway transfer in 1957 was abandoned when the playwright, who died in 1994, refused producers demands for script changes.
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The Negro Ensemble Company staged an Off Broadway revival of the lay in 1998, but the Roundabout production will be the 66-year-old play’s official Broadway debut.
The theater company describes Trouble in Mind as a “wry and moving look at racism, identity, and ego in the world of New York theatre” that was at “the forefront of both the Civil Rights and feminist movements.” Childress’ work has been a part of Roundabout’s multi-year The Refocus Project designed to spotlight 20th Century Black plays and their playwrights. The project, which has included a recent reading of another Childress play, Wine in the Wilderness, is presented in association with Black Theatre United, of which LaChanze is a founding member.
Trouble in Mind‘s design team will include Arnulfo Maldonado (sets), Emilio Sosa (costumes), Kathy A. Perkins (lights), Dan Moses Schreier (sound) and Nona Hendryx (original music).
LaChanze’s other stage credits include her Tony-winning performance as Celie in The Color Purple, the original production of Once on This Island, If/Then, Ragtime, Company, and Uptown It’s Hot. She won a 2010 Emmy Award for her performance in the PBS special Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise. She also has performed the one-woman show Feeling Good in venues around the world.
Her most recent TV credits include roles in NBC’s The Blacklist and in Amazon Prime’s The Underground Railroad. She recurred in the CBS All Access hit show The Good Fight and appeared in HBO’s The Night Of, among many other series. Film credits include Marishka Phillips’ Melinda and The Help, among others.