Mirrors mirrors on the walls. That's what you're seeing all over the stage in James Noone's set, as Lena Horne (Leslie Uggams), now aging in the 1980s, observes her younger self (Nikki Crawford) through the travails of a difficult life. Her torments include having to surrender custody of her one, infant son, Teddy, to her estranged husband (Phil Attmore), as she chooses to leave New York to accept an offer by MGM Studios in Hollywood. For a light-skinned African-American chanteuse swimming upstream toward stardom in post-World War II America, the crosscurrents she encounters include the kind of stock bigotry (lobbying not to play maids in the movies) and gossip surrounding her secret, tempestuous marriage to Jewish arranger Lennie Hayton (Robert Torti). Another mirror image includes the resentful adult Teddy (Joran Barbour) and Horne's father, Teddy Sr. (Cleavant Derricks). Ensnared in Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt of the '50s, and thereby shunned by the Hollywood studios, Horne finds employment in France (of course) and on Broadway. The despondency caused by waking up one day and realizing that she's lost all the men in her life, including Teddy from kidney disease, raises the question of how one endures life's tempests.... More >>>