(She’s backed up by a live trio stationed offstage: R.C. Her “neo-soul” voice, of course, is heavenly, with its tough vibrato, gently caressed vowels and Holiday growls. Singing a whimsical quasi-French number and a couple of Billie Holiday-infused bluesy jazz songs, Badu was in her element. That she does three times in her show and, in those moments, Badu’s considerable star power really turns on the high beams. Not comfortable nor especially gifted at doing broad comedy, at least not on Thursday night, she appeared to relax only when she stood behind an old-fashioned microphone and sang. Crunch, crunch, crunch into the mic.ĭivided into 13 brief “scenes,” Live Nudity (no nudity, by the way) is, says Badu to the crowd, her way “as an artist … to be in control of my inconsistencies.” She’s got the inconsistent part down. Another bit that goes stale puts Badu center stage slowly eating a bag of potato chips.
Yes, Badu dons sock puppets and, using a Rosie Perez accent, has her cotton-clad fists get into a domestic squabble that devolves into repetitions of “fuckin’ shit” until you wish one of the puppets would actually sock the other sock and knock it out. What she did Thursday night was a hodgepodge of improvised solo sketch comedy (and not for a moment was that a good idea … Badu is not Whoopi Goldberg), intimate musical lounge act (loved that) and … puppet show? Mostly Badu needs to figure out exactly what she’s trying to say in this piece. (She lists herself in the program as director, musical director and costume-makeup-lighting designer.) Like after Badu actually writes a script that makes some sense and gets a director who can tell her what does and doesn’t work. For too much of the hour and 45-minute show, it was, as Badu admitted to the audience, “just me making this shit up right now.”īadu’s hometown launch of Live Nudity is part of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters “dress performance series.” And it felt in many ways like a sloppy dress rehearsal for something that might turn into something better later on. Badu had a few things, just not enough to call what she did a fully satisfying evening of live solo theater starring a four-time Grammy winner. “I’ll be frank with you, I really don’t have anything,” said Erykah Badu as she walked barefoot onto the stage in the Naomi Bruton Theater downtown Thursday night for the first of three performances of her new one-woman show, Live Nudity.
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