Dinah
Was
Starring E. Faye Butler, Carla J. Hargrove, and Harry
Althaus
By Oliver Goldstick
Directed by David Petrarca
Arena Stage
Kreeger Theatre
1101 Sixth Street, SW
Washington, DC 20024
Box Office: 202/488-3300
Through March 26, 2000
Dinah
Was … Magnificant!
By Shirley J. Gregory
Dinah
Was is a marvelous musical about the life of the remarkable Blues singer
Dinah Washington. Fast paced,
spirited and engrossing with vignettes of the singer’s life centered around
her debut in Las Vegas, the audience is shown what shaped this woman; what drove
her to become the determined, stubborn woman she was.
Dinah was as close as anyone could come to being a self-made person.
With no one to truly understand, support, or encourage her, Dinah’s
determination and stubbornness were the means by which she achieved every
success in her life. She didn’t
have a support group – everyone depended upon her but few understood or
wholehearted accepted her ambition.
Driven
by a desire to become “somebody,” Dinah left home as a teenager to become
acquainted with and immolate Billie Holiday, singing where and when she could in
any club that would have her, working her way up to singing with Lionel
Hampton’s band, and working with EmArcy and Mercury and well-known
contemporary song writer Leonard Feather. Nevertheless,
Dinah’s mother found nothing praiseworthy about Dinah during her entire life.
Even though Dinah showered her mother with money and expensive gifts, her
mother constantly berated her, her material feelings apparently eclipsed by her
jealousy of Dinah’s success. Dinah,
however, never stopped trying to win her mother’s praise.
Dinah’s
agent was more interested in Dinah as his money maker than as a person.
She was a huge success as a African American Blues singer, and he
didn’t want to jeopardize that by letting her record different styles of
music. But, Dinah wanted a wider
audience. She wanted to cross over
to popular rock; to be recognized by African Americans and whites alike, like
Nat King Cole. She wanted to have
artistic control of her albums, and she wanted TV appearances.
Her agent and recording companies called her difficult, a prima donna,
but today’s artists would be called perfectionists, consummate professionals
who really care about their art. Part
of the problem in the 50’s and early 60’s, of course, was that agents and
recording studios were white-owned, and Blacks were expected to be humble, not
outspoken and opinionated … especially not women.
Dinah did make it to TV, and her appearance in Las Vegas was an
indication of how popular she’d become with that wider audience she craved.
Dinah
was blunt and uncompromising. Married
seven times, Dinah could not find lasting love because she was such a strong,
driven woman. She insisted on being
in charge, even in her domestic relationships.
She had a close female friend who traveled with her on her tours for many
years, between the times they had a falling out because Dinah became too
high-handed. Perhaps she was
self-centered because she didn’t receive enough love or appreciation in her
personal relationships, but, she never allowed anyone to forget that she was the
star upon which hanged her family, close friends, and associates’ fortunes –
thereby driving those she needed, and those who wanted to be close to her
further away.
Only
a robot could be as strong and uncompromising as Dinah was day after day,
obstacle after obstacle, in order to accomplish what she accomplished without a
loving support system. Dinah was
caring, feeling, and hurting woman who wanted unconditional love, and who did
not want to have to fight for everything. So,
partially because she was unhappy and partially because she needed her
determination bolstered through her many difficulties, Dinah turned to alcohol
for comfort. Much of her
outspokenness and bravado was attributed to alcohol, as well as a lot of the
“clowning” she did during performances.
In addition, she took multiple prescriptions for her moodiness and weight
control.
According to Dinah Was playwright Oliver Goldstick, Dinah had just made a decision that
might have made the difference in her life.
An incident in Las Vegas caused her to reconsider her life of
selfishness. Love of self was being replaced by putting others in the
limelight for a change; helping them achieve their potentials.
She’d even found a new acceptance for her mother’s intolerance, and
had the desire to put her two sons in the center of her life instead of on the
sidelines where they’d always been while she was busy making a name for
herself. Unfortunately, it was
during that visit home that the
accidental combination of her two addictions, alcohol and prescription drugs,
cut her life short at age 39, at the peak of her talent and her career.
The Dinah
Was cast is marvelous, but E. Faye Butler dominated the show as Dinah,
just as Dinah would have done. Ms.
Butler’s rich voice filled the theatre and enchanted the audience with her
versatility that rivals Dinah’s own. She
is indeed the personification of Dinah Washington.
Costuming was striking, but they and the stage sets were minimal.
This was totally sufficient, however,
the characters as portrayed, especially Dinah, were bigger than life and
dwarfed the stage and anything on it.
Dinah Was is sad only when one considers what she might
have accomplished had she lived. Otherwise,
it is a portrayal of a strong Black woman determined to be successful in her
chosen field at a time when most women are housewives, and Black women were
expected to stay in the kitchen out of sight.
Dinah was a woman with a vision, with no real support system, who had to
become selfish, stubborn and single-minded to gain her successes because no one
else was going to make it easy for her. The
script is excellently written; it is almost as if Dinah was telling us her story
in all it’s unvarnished, sometimes inglorious, yet many times victorious
truths, and it brings us as close as we’ll ever get to the soul of the woman.
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