"Nina Simone was always told to sit down and shut up: 'You're making too much noise! ​​You're the angry black woman.' It was my mission to bring all that noise to the forefront and answer these questions: why was she so unstable, angry, sad?", explains Laiona Michelle, who sings, dances and interprets the great artist, in "Little girl blue", at New World Stages.

"Feeling good", "Ain't got no - I got Life", "Love me or leave me", "Don't let me be misunderstood"... for two hours, in a room with 200 seats, the actress , who wrote the show, regales audiences with her warm voice and legendary Nina Simone hits.

Racism

It also explores the life of a woman named Eunice Waymon, born in 1933 in North Carolina.

Gifted for singing and the classical piano, she had to give it up after her failure to enter a conservatory in Philadelphia.

Bruised, she will attribute it all her life to racism.

Singer, comedian and author Laiona Michelle on stage, playing American diva and civil rights activist Nina Simone in the show "Little Girl Blue" at the New World Stages theater in New York, March 9, 2022 ANGELA WEISS AFP

The show doesn't dilute anything about Nina Simone's suffering, her husband and manager Andrew Stroud's beatings, or her mental turmoil.

As for its radicalism, it is claimed.

The singer was happy to say that she was "not non-violent".

On stage in 1969, she asked "black people": "Are you ready to burn down buildings?".

However, the piece, which comes to life during a concert in April 1968, in the tumult of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, must do without songs written by Nina Simone and which have become emblematic of the civil rights movement.

Rights

This is the case of "Mississippi Goddam", one of the most famous, which she composed in response to the fire in 1963 by members of the Ku Klux Klan of a church in Alabama, in which perished four young black girls.

In question, the impossibility of obtaining the rights of the song.

The team of "Little girl blue" attributes the refusal to a Californian lawyer, Steven Ames Brown.

The latter, who advised Nina Simone at the end of his life, presents himself as "the administrator since 1988 of his catalog" musical.

Nina Simone, who died in 2003, ceded her rights to a charitable fund that still exists.

Singer, comedian and author Laiona Michelle on stage, playing American diva and civil rights activist Nina Simone in the show "Little Girl Blue" at the New World Stages theater in New York, March 9, 2022 ANGELA WEISS AFP

In an email to AFP, Steven Ames Brown does not have words harsh enough against "Little girl blue", a show "fictitious, superficial and which does not do justice" to his "friend".

Without giving any date, he calls on fans to wait for "the play based on his autobiography (which) will be on stage in New York and London".

A competing show, therefore, but "faithful to her life as she expressed it", he promises.

Broadway

The team of "Little girl blue", already successfully played in 2019 in New Jersey, feels more legitimate.

"Nina was a black woman and this piece was written and is performed by a black woman who wanted to pay homage to an icon belonging to the historical culture of black people", affirms the producer, Rashad Chambers.

"We deserve to be masters of our story," he adds, also suspecting the lawyer of having yielded to a more attractive offer.

"These people have no understanding of (the) life" of Nina Simone, retorts Steven Ames Brown.

For the piece, the handicap remains relative, because Nina Simone wrote her legend with covers, more accessible in terms of rights.

And after 17 songs, including the melancholy "Little girl blue", or "Black is the color", the public applauds, standing.

Laiona Michelle wants to bring her work to one of the most prestigious theaters on Broadway in New York, where biopics already celebrate Bob Dylan, Tina Turner or Michael Jackson: "This is where Nina Simone deserves to be. On the big scene".

© 2022 AFP