Careers don’t come any more meteoric than Headley’s. In her native Trinidad she was something of a musical prodigy. With her lithe grace she looks like music. “I always sang,” she says, in her Caribbean lilt. “Mummy says my first performance was at 2. I did drama in a group affiliated with our church. I didn’t know what Broadway was. I thought it was one theater where the shows came and left.” At 15 she took an improbable route from Trinidad to Ft. Wayne, Ind., with her church-pastor parents. “It was culture shock beyond belief,” she says. “But Ft. Wayne kept me safe. If we’d come straight to New York, I would’ve walked back to Trinidad, on the water if need be.” Part of the shock, of course, had to do with race. “I had to learn this whole minority thing,” she says. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m the majority in Trinidad.’ I had to deal with it. Now, whenever I need to calm down I go to Ft. Wayne and sit there for two days. Mummy cooks and you go to the mall and then it’s OK.” From Ft. Wayne Headley went on to study musical theater at Northwestern, where Broadway scouts spotted her and offered her a role in “Ragtime.” “To leave school was against everything I was brought up to believe,” says Headley. But her stint in “Ragtime” led to Disney’s giving her the role of Nala, the feisty lioness in “The Lion King.” Her leonine performance showed Disney it had found its Aida.
Headley and Sherie Rene Scott, who plays the Egyptian Princess Amneris, are the only cast survivors of the show’s troubled two-year gestation. Its first tryout production had almost fatal problems. Elton John recalls that “the production wasn’t right. It was too flippant, too Las Vegas. " The show’s most Las Vegasy element, the mobile pyramid that became notorious for immobility, would have shocked any sensible pharaoh. “The bloody thing broke down during 75 percent of the performances,” says John. “When that happened the cast would sit on chairs and act out the songs.” Disney brought in a new creative team: director Robert Falls, designer Bob Crowley, choreographer Wayne Cilento and playwright David Henry Hwang, who with Falls reworked Linda Woolverton’s original book. But when the show moved to Chicago last December there were still problems, and John angrily stomped out on a couple of occasions. “Two songs had elongated techno-music at the end for the dancing, which I didn’t write. I was so pissed. I don’t want anybody putting bloody techno- music at the end of these songs. It’s my name on the show.” The musical aliens have now been deported.
So the technical problems have been solved (except for the frequent ear-crushing overamplification), but not all the esthetic ones. Verdi fans will not like the elements of camp humor that reside in this “Aida,” along with the tragedy of a doomed love affair between two people from warring cultures. But, like another pop entertainer, Shakespeare, John and Rice hit their audience high and low. Low is engagingly represented by the campiest number, “My Strongest Suit,” a Supremes-like song in which Princess Amneris unabashedly admits that she’s a superficial girl who cares only about clothes, singing: “In negligee or formal/I am anything but normal/For dress has always been/My strongest suit.” Praising Rice for the lyric to this ditty, the mischievously Wildean John said, “Tim, are you sure you’re straight? That’s a gay man’s lyric.” The number is delivered with impeccable comic timing by Sherie Rene Scott, giving a captivating performance as the ditsy blond princess who (unlike Verdi’s vindictively cruel Amneris) comes to sadly understand the love that has sprung up between her betrothed, Radames, and the captive Aida. Radames is sung by Adam Pascal. He’s a good young performer in his “Rent”-rock style, but you’re not quite convinced that this Radames has the depth that accounts for Aida’s falling in love with the man who enslaved her. Singing and acting, Headley is a force of nature projecting anger, fear, desperation and desire.
The show’s darker and more dramatic mood hits a peak of intensity with “The Gods Love Nubia,” Aida’s lament for her vanquished homeland, sung in gospel mode by Headley with shattering power. John is pushing the same buttons that he has always pushed as the most successful soft-pop composer of his time. But the combination of his music with the show’s other elements–Crowley’s clever designs, including a vertical Hockney-like swimming pool and a fashion show clearly from some demented Cairo couturier; Cilento’s Egyptoid choreography, like hieroglyphics jump-started to life–add up to a Broadway spectacle that’s probably going to satisfy a lot of people for a long time.
For Headley, what matters most is the cross-cultural implications of the love story. “A lot of people are writing telling me that they are in an interracial relationship and they want to say thank you. I’m really touched by that. The other night I kissed Radames at the end of the act and a woman called out ‘It’s about time’.” It’s the beginning of Headley’s time. Verdi would have spluttered in shock at this “Aida.” But he would have loved this Aida.
AidaThe Palace Theater New York Open
