She was a girl from Boston with a voice from heaven, who shot through the stars from gospel choir to dance floor diva. But what the world didn't know was how Donna Summer risked it all to break through barriers, becoming the icon of an era and the inspiration for every music diva who followed.
Tony Award winner LaChanze (The Color Purple), Ariana DeBose (Hamilton, A Bronx Tale) and newcomer Storm Lever play Donna Summer, taking us through her tumultuous life, tempestuous loves and mega-watt musical hits. Spend the night in her electrifying universe.
To be clear, the clunking weirdness of this jukebox musical devoted to the 'queen of disco' has nothing to do with the three singers representing Summer at different stages of her life. Storm Lever as young 'Duckling Donna,' Ariana DeBose as 'Disco Donna,' and-most stage-commandingly -LaChanze as 'Diva Donna' do all they can to animate and give variously fierce or smooth fuel to the show's retinue of Summer's standards; the same goes for the hard-working, hard-dancing ensemble. (LaChanze particularly stands out. The poor dancers labor through some really odd choreography.)
And that's not even including 'Bad Girl' and 'No More Tears' ('Enough is Enough'); enough, when it comes to Summer, never really being enough. Not for we longtime fans, anyway. And unless you are in the parody business, you then need the actual life-story of the singer to have a structure on which to hang all of those songs, being as they express simple feelings, not complex narratives. So since you need all of these levels of permission from the flame, or the keeper thereof, to even enter the heat of the dance-floor, your chances of telling the warts-and-all truth are, you might say, limited.
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