LaChanze’s Plans for the Next Generation Are Painted All Over Broadway’s Marquees

A lot of artists, especially the ones working in live theater, made big pandemic career pivots. Only for LaChanze could such a pivot summon two Tony Awards.

LaChanze—an award-winning stage actor best known for originating roles in Once on This Island (1991 Tony nomination), The Color Purple (2006 Tony win), and Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018 Tony nomination)—debuted as a Broadway producer during the 2022-23 season with two productions. Those productions were Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, the 2023 Tony Award winner for Best Revival of a Play, and Kimberly Akimbo, the 2023 Tony Award winner for Best Musical.

“David Stone, who was the genius producer behind Wicked, also is my mentor,” LaChanze tells Tamsen Fadal for The Broadway Show. “He brought me on to produce Topdog/Underdog with him and Kimberly Akimbo, and I wanted to knock it out of the park for him because I was so excited for the opportunity.” She seems to have done just that with a season of any Broadway producer’s dreams, let alone one new to the dealings on this side of the footlights. But an inventory of LaChanze’s growing collection of marquees makes it clear that her rookie year was not a case of beginner’s luck.

Like a victory lap, Fadal walks with LaChanze through the theater district to visit her flagship musical, Kimberly Akimbo, along with this season’s new additions, Here Lies Love and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding—the three productions that currently hold her producing stamp.

“This all started during COVID,” LaChanze recounts in front of the Booth Theatre, where Kimberly Akimbo has been comfortably settled for over a year. “We all were stuck and not knowing what was next.” For better or worse, the pandemic also happened to coincide with an already shifting tide in LaChanze’s career. “Being a woman of this age, my midlife,” she says, “I still want to matter. I still want to contribute positively to society. But the industry is telling me, ‘Oh, you're aging out of certain roles.’ Actually what I'm doing is I'm aging into certain roles.”

That comment, perhaps, is a nod to the leading role she immediately landed in the Alice Childress play Trouble in Mind in the first post-COVID Broadway season—a performance that earned her yet another Tony nomination. However, it also gestures toward her new identity in the theater industry. “I'm aging into this next role of my life as a Broadway producer,” LaChanze affirms. “And I'm really good at it.”

As a producer, her taste is informed by both the desire to rebuild audiences post-pandemic and an instinct toward inclusivity. “First thing I ask myself is, who's coming to see this?” she explains outside the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, home to the twice-extended Jaja’s African Hair Braiding (playwright Jocelyn Bioh's Broadway debut). “We want shows that we all can participate in and be audience members in.”

It’s the common thread that she argues connects all of her shows, from the intimate Kimberly Akimbo—“No matter what age you are, if you're 13 to 103, this show moves you”—to the slice-of-life dramedy that is Jaja—“Everyone is overwhelmed. I mean, 65-year-old gentlemen to five-year-old little girls who usually get their hair braided”—to the immersive historical dance-pop extravaganza Here Lies Love, which will play its final performance at the Broadway Theatre on November 26—“We have this theme around karaoke and dancing and disco, but we're also sneaking in the message of how important it is to the Filipino community that this story is being told.”

“Our mission as Broadway producers in our community is to engage new people and younger faces and stories that will bring a wide diversity of audience members into our theaters,” says LaChanze. The next production to fit that bill will be The Outsiders, a musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel—many young readers’ first literary love. That production will be opening at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre this spring, boasting Angelina Jolie on the producing team.

“I'm super excited about bringing that show to Broadway,” LaChanze says, reflecting on how this dance-forward, Jamestown Revival-scored piece fits into her current mosaic of Broadway productions. “I don't just want to be the producer that does one type of show,” she notes, “because I am committed to help cultivating new audiences.”

This forward-gazing, big-picture perspective is not a luxury often afforded to actors who live performance-to-performance. Now, however, her theatrical work can have an eye to the future. “I am looking forward to the next generation,” she says. “For the next stage of what I'm going to be doing.”

“This is just the beginning for me.”