![]() As the scene shifts to a club date, the platform the musicians occupy slides toward the front of the stage as Washington publicly humiliates a sax player she thinks is upstaging her. Under David Petrarca's direction, some of the early scenes are almost breathtaking in their fluidity. Like Washington, Butler lays her voice out with everything she's got, and it's thrilling. Butler closes the first act with a rendition of "I Wanna Be Loved" that's almost desperately sad. But Washington's music is the heart of the show, and Butler brings it to life with flair the fun numbers swing and the blues ballads hurt.īutler, whose lush, powerful voice is huskier than Washington's, crawls up to the middle of the pitch a little slowly now and then, but that's her only flaw. ![]() Goldstick's tart dialogue can be a real weapon in Butler's mouth her Washington seems extremely bright and extremely undisciplined with her emotions, unable to lay off the biting remarks whenever she's in a foul mood. The singer tongue-lashes the racist Sahara staffers who politely tell her she's dirt and launches into "Bad Luck," an up-tempo blues song (played by a top-notch jazz quintet led by musical director William Knowles) that lets us know she's been through these kinds of hassles plenty of times. The playwright wastes no time working Washington's signature tunes into the texture of the tale. So Washington-fierce and formidable, the way Butler does it-cusses out the management, rips off her white fur coat and sits in her slip in the lobby, threatening not to perform, while her life flashes by. (The year is 1959.) They want her to stay in a trailer on the parking lot. Washington, known as "The Queen of the Blues," is headlining at the hotel, but the white managers won't give the black woman a room. She does exactly what the show demands of her-she acts like a star, wonderfully.īutler's Washington is larger than life the moment she glides through the revolving doors (cleverly emblematic of her mercurial, topsy-turvy life) in set designer Michael Yeargan's attractive cobalt-blue rendering of the Sahara lobby. Faye Butler gives an appropriately explosive performance in the role. In "Dinah Was," the entertaining musical biography now playing at Arena Stage, playwright Oliver Goldstick portrays blues and jazz singer Dinah Washington as a bomb going off in the lobby of Las Vegas's Sahara Hotel, and actress E. ![]() Faye Butler Brings That Other Washington to Life ![]()
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