LaChanze Has an Expansive Vision for Broadway's Future

LaChanze Credit - Jenny Anderson—Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions

When LaChanze was publicizing the play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding during the 2023 season, she approached it a little differently than most Broadway producers. Instead of relying on the traditional avenues of theatrical publicity—the New York Times, Playbill.com—LaChanze decided to go directly to the audience she wanted to reach. She drove to Harlem with a stack of flyers, going from one Black hair salon to another, inviting owners and their customers to see the show with a special discount code. Then she invited 25 salon owners to join her for dinner at the famous Harlem restaurant Melba’s to talk to them about the show. “I knew it was going to be difficult to get the women who own these salons to even know that they’re invited to this space, and to feel welcomed,” she said. “I told them, ‘We’re doing a story about your lives on Broadway.’”

The show was nominated for five Tonys. But for LaChanze, 63, that was just the beginning. She wants her projects to be an on-ramp for a new type of Broadway audience. “All of these women came down to Broadway and they left our show and walked down the street and said, ‘Hey, I want to see that show,’” she says.

After getting her big break (and first Tony nomination) originating the role of Ti Moune in Once on This Island in 1990, LaChanze won a Tony for her performance as Celie in The Color Purple, and got a third acting nomination for her 2021 performance in Trouble in Mind. But recently, she has her eye on making an even bigger impact. In 2022, she made her debut as a Broadway producer with Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog and the musical hit Kimberly Akimbo, which together won six Tonys, including Best Revival of a Play and Best Musical. That year, she also became president of Black Theatre United, an organization she co-founded with such Black theater luminaries as Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Billy Porter to demand racial equity in commercial theater in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

In 2021, Black Theatre United released A New Deal for Broadway, which led several major theater companies to commit to diversifying their creative teams. In 2022, at the urging of Black Theatre United, the Cort Theatre was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre and the Brooks Atkinson Theatre was renamed the Lena Horne Theatre. The group also built a marketing internship program in order to teach young Black creatives about the business of commercial theater and will launch a design expo and a musical-theater scholarship later this year. The goal, LaChanze says, is to create a pipeline of Black talent to make Broadway more diverse. “We hear oftentimes: We want to give a person a job, but we can't find them, or we don't know where the budding lighting designers are. Where do you find them?” she says. “And we're like, Well, let us show you where they are.”

LaChanze sees increasing racial equity as benefiting all audiences. Thanks in part to her efforts, the 2022-2023 Broadway season saw the most diverse audience to date, with 29% of audience members identifying as BIPOC, according to the Broadway League. “One of the issues that I have with our industry, commercial theater, is that we do think about shows as being the Black show, the female show, the gay show, the white show, the Asian show, the Hispanic show,” she says. “Once we get past that, we will start being more inclusive overall.”

She recalls specifically telling the marketing team of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding not to emphasize Black women in the marketing materials. “It is obvious that this show is starring Black women. We do not have to say it. We just have to say, ‘Come see this great play.’”

Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.