Your Gonna Love Me — Page 2

If you have seen the movie CAMP you'll remember there are two scenes where YOU'RE GONNA LOVE ME is performed by a girl. Then if you watch Holiday's rendition it will blow you away. It really seems like two different songs. ( I know, I know, CAMP is about a bunch of kids at camp who are not professional actors and should NOT sound like an experienced performer. ) The contrast is amazing.

Joanna Chilcoat, the girl who sang AITY in Camp, has a great voice ( though of course it wasn't purposely suitable for that part).

Using Joanna was hilarious and very much intentional, though, because in the scene preceding, there are two black campers complaining about the lack of productions suitable for black actors (one of the little boys is dressed in shtetl-like garb and payes because he is in a production of Fiddler on the Roof! hee!) Cut to a scene of this little kid cast as CURTIS, of all people, being sung And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going by a white girl (with a voice more like Andrea McArdle than Jennifer Holliday). It was funny stuff.

What I was blown away by in seeing Jennifer Holiday perform this in its entirety for the first time in a long while was the staging that divided and built the song physically as it built musically and emotionally. Michael Bennett was truly a genius. I wish he were still around.

And in the beginning...when Jill doesn't remember Fritzi, and Fritzi tells her they were in a show together the previous summer.

The show? 'Night Mother! lol.

I saw "Dreamgirls" in early 1982, just after it first opened and of course, there was so much buzz about Jennifer. When she sang "And I Am Telling You" and people realized she was going into THAT song, there was a palpable electric buzz in the theater. Breathing, which can become quite rythmic when 1200 people are in the same room, STOPPED. It was stunning. AtT the end, the hair was still standing up on my neck. My girlfriend turned to ma we filed out at intermission and said "What did you think?" And strangely enough, the one thought at that moment that flashed across my mind was "Ethel Mermen." It took me a good ten minutes to figure out that when I was a little kid I had been amazed by The Merm in Gypsy and this was the first time since then that someone hadsung as loud and as arrestingly as she had. Huh....

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Allofmylife--wow! You were so lucky to be there. I know how I felt just watching the eight minute Tony telecast. I can't even imagine it even came close to the magic you experienced in the theater.

I was there too, all (saw it several times...with a few different effies), and what I find most interesting is that NOONE does that scene like Jennifer. That said, she was not a great actress (I felt like she lacked some focus.) Lillias acted the part VERY well, and her "One Night Only" and "I Am Changing" were unparalleled, imo. The concert recording is not the best representation of her work in the show (80s revival) when I saw her play Effie 5 times. Her vocals, along with everyone elses, are very strained due to the rough time they had those weeks around 9/11.

..and yes, it was the most beautifully staged show I've ever seen, that scene in particular.

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Blueroses, I wish you had seen it, too. We hada spare ticket (we had spare tickets for every show that week, SOMEONE - I'm not naming names - blew us off to go lay in the sun) and we gave it away at the door. Someone got the thrill of a lifetime. I don't remember if it was that show or one of the others but I got kisssed real well that week by some girl.

Anyway, what I was going to say is (and of course, as a member of the entertainment industry I preface this by saying it would be SOOOO WRONG) if you go to www.youtube.com and type in "Dreamgirls" there are four amazing sequences from the original show from early in the run. If memory serves, Clevant Derricks and Obba Babatunde singing "Stepping to the Bad Side", the Vogue photoshoot, J. Holliday doing "And I Am Telling You - actually from the Tonys, but WOW, the whole scene with dialogue is there and recently someone put up Loretta Devine singing "Ain't No Party." You may recognize her as short, chubby, crazy Marla from "Boston Public." Back then, she was thinner than Paris Hilton and what a delivery!

Enjoy. And whish you'd been there.....

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Allofmylife, I saw all of those clips. They were great. I didn't watch Boston Public regularly, but Loretta Devine was my absolute favorite in Waiting to Exhale (*sighs* love that movie...Angela Bassett setting the car on fire, Gregory Hines, pre-crack ho Whitney). It was weird seeing her so skinny!