(PITTSFIELD, Mass.) – Tony Award-winning actress and vocalist Tonya Pinkins will perform a tribute to Ethel Waters at Barrington Stage Company’s Mr. Finn’s Cabaret on Saturday, June 8, 2013, at 9pm and Sunday, June 9, 2013, at 8pm. The program follows Ethel Waters from poverty to Broadway to Hollywood triumphs, in a moving and glorious tribute to one of the greatest blues and jazz singers of the 20th century.
Ethel Waters was an African American blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress. She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts, although she began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Her best-known recordings include, “Dinah”, “Stormy Weather”, “Taking a Chance on Love”, “Heat Wave”, “Supper Time”, “Am I Blue?”, and “Cabin in the Sky”, as well as her version of the spiritual “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”. Waters was the second African American, after Hattie McDaniel, to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Waters’s difficult life began as the result of the rape of her teenage mother by a so-called family friend, and continued on through her own marriage to an abuser at the early age of 13. Yet Waters persevered and worked her up through the black vaudeville circuit to Harlem concert stages to national record labels, including Columbia, for which she had a hit in 1925 with “Dinah,” and for which she recorded “Heebie Jeebies”, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, “Someday, Sweetheart”, “Am I Blue?” and “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue.”
She went on to sing with Duke Ellington, to star at the Cotton Club, starred in a national radio program, was the highest-paid performer on Broadway in the early 1940s, won awards for stage and film acting in the 1950s, and wrote two memoirs.
Oprah Winfrey described Tony Award-winner Tonya Pinkins as one of the “Ten Women in America Who Will Take Your Breath Away.” Pinkins has also performed on Broadway in Jelly’s Last Jam (Tony Award), Caroline, or Change; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Play On!; The Wild Party; Radio Golf; and Merrily We Roll Along. Her television work includes “As the World Turns,” “All My Children,” “Army Wives” and “24.” Pinkins has won the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critic’s Circle, Clarence Derwent, Monarch, Black Theater Alliance, Garland, L.A. Drama Critics, Audelco and OBIE Awards.
Tickets are $35, general admission.
Named after William Finn, the Tony Award-winning composer/lyricist of Falsettos and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and artistic producer of Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab, Mr. Finn’s Cabaret is located on the lower level of the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, 36 Linden Street, Pittsfield. The box office at Mr. Finn’s Cabaret opens 30 minutes prior to curtain. To purchase tickets or for more information, call the Barrington Stage Box Office at 413-236-8888 or visit Barrington Stage Company. The Box Office is located at 30 Union Street. Tickets are $25, general admission. Beer, wine and soda are available.