Black is the Color of my Voice plays to a full house

Apphia Campbell’s award-winning show has been performed in London, New York, Shanghai and Edinburgh but, finally, it has found its way to Diss. I’ve seen many shows at the Corn Hall that warranted a full house, but this must surely have been the biggest audience yet for theatre, and deservedly so. With a mix of monologue and song, we were taken on a mesmerising, and sometimes challenging, trip exploring the life and times of Mena Bordeaux, a brilliant black pianist and singer clearly modelled on the life of Nina Simone.  

Although the part of Bordeaux was originally performed by Campbell, for this tour she is directing, having handed the acting duties over to Florence Odumosu, a superb singer in her own right. We first meet Mena hidden away in a hotel room, surrounded by memories unpacked from her suitcase, while chatting away to a photo of her dead father, ticking off seminal moments of her life. It was a clever device that freed the production from the pitfalls of more slavishly accurate biographical plays that too often come across as dramatized Wikipedia entries.

While it was also about as far from a jukebox musical as you can imagine, Campbell nonetheless deftly weaved Simone’s songbook into the narrative, in a way that both enhanced the drama and lent new significance to the songs’ lyrics. This gave the play a far more emotionally satisfying portrait of the activist and artist that the bald facts ever could. The audience certainly though so, rewarding Odumosu with a rare standing ovation that was thoroughly deserved.