An Evening with LaChanze

Vivo Performing Arts
Berklee Performance Center
Boston, MA
November 1, 2026

By John Amodeo

“When I auditioned for Company, Sondheim was in the room,” gulped LaChanze. “I was so extremely nervous, I decided to sit on my hands and I sang it as if I was on a subway train, and I used the people behind the table as if they were the other people on the subway. When I finished the song, I got up and walked out of the room as if I was leaving the train as I sang the final line, ‘Another hundred people just got off of the train,’ and Stephen Sondheim stood up and applauded. And I thought, ‘I think I got the part.’”

Tony Award winner LaChanze did indeed get the part of Marta in the 1995 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s seminal 1970 musical Company that challenged the institution of marriage and relationship norms. It was her fourth Broadway show in a four-decade career that so far numbers ten Broadway shows as a performer and seven as a producer, earning her five Tony Awards, one as a performer and four as a producer. Add to that becoming a concert and cabaret performer, and you have one busy thespian. She has performed in concert in some of the snazziest nightclubs and arenas, having headlined at 54 Below in New York, the Kennedy Center in D.C., and the Smith Center in Las Vegas, among many others. Boston audiences will have a rare chance to see LaChanze in concert when Vivo Performing Arts presents An Evening with LaChanze at the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday, November 1.

Elliot Lanes of MD Theater Guide described LaChanze in concert as “a force of nature on any stage. [She] sang every song with the passion and power that those of us that know her are accustomed to hearing.” Broadway World’s Stephen Mosher observed, “LaChanze has an uncanny ability to reinvent any song she sings. Those new treatments of old songs give LaChanze her own playground, her own story hour, her own voice, and that is what being an artist and being a star is all about.”

What LaChanze brings to her concerts is the panache, poise, and power that comes from a life on the Broadway stage. Her first Broadway gig was the short-lived 1986 Uptown…It’s Hot, which ran for only 24 performances, but helped get her cast as one of the Stepp Sisters, a small but pivotal role in the original 1985 production of Dreamgirls.

That became a steppingstone to her first lead role on Broadway as Ti Moune in the original 1990 production of the Stephen Flaherty/Lynn Ahrens musical Once on This Island. “It was such a fluke,” she chuckled. “I auditioned for it from Backstage; it was a newspaper back then. I had no manager, no agent. I read the ad and I thought I sounded right for the part. So, I said I’d go and audition. Strangely, there was no one there before or after me. They were all reading books at their desk when I walked in, this was before iPhones and laptops, and I was trying to get their attention. Then, they heard me sing, and they all looked up.”

What followed were seven more Broadway productions where LaChanze played a lead or featured role, creating her characters in all of them, including that of Sarah in Ragtime. I know what you are thinking. We all know Audra McDonald starred as Sarah in the original 1998 production. And nearly a year later, LaChanze replaced her in the role. But that’s not the whole story. “I was the first person to play Sarah,” she declared.” I was in the Los Angeles pre-Broadway production. The Toronto production, with Audra, started after that. The LA production was supposed to go to New York, but the producer changed course and brought the Toronto production to New York instead. When it came time to replace Audra, the LA production had closed and I was available. I could only do the show for a couple of months then because I had gotten pregnant. Audra would have had to leave anyway because soon after she left, she became pregnant, too. We’re friends, and we were both at that time in our lives.”

LaChanze was raised in a military family that moved around a lot, but when her parents split when she was 11, she settled in Connecticut with her mom. “While I was born in Florida, Connecticut is what I claim because that’s where I discovered Broadway,” she revealed. “The commercials on TV in the morning when I was eating my cereal included ones about Broadway shows. When I went to my first Broadway show, I was smitten.” And her sixth Broadway show, The Color Purple, would garner her a Tony Award for her performance as Celie in the original 2005 production.

But between Ragtime and The Color Purple, tragedy struck. Her then husband, Calvin Gooding, a securities trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed in the 9/11 attacks while at work in Tower One of the World Trade Center. Less than a year later, LaChanze was to reprise her role as Ti Moune in a 10th Anniversary Concert Performance of Once on This Island in his memory and as a benefit for the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. I attended this concert, and during her first big number “Waiting for Life,” when she reached the line “going somewhere, going far” in that bel canto voice of hers, the audience erupted in cheers that could have buckled the sidewalks outside the Winter Garden Theater. “It almost took me out of character,” she admitted. “I was so emotional already in that moment. And here was this wall of love and support coming my way. This was not long after my husband passed away. The community of theater is what helped me through that time, lifting me, and loving me and I really needed that.”

Despite her lauded Broadway career, when it comes to her concert performing, LaChanze is not one to rest on her laurels, and has eschewed the typical program of songs from her Broadway career. Instead, she is presenting something new and fresh. “I’ve curated this show especially for this performance,” she proclaimed. “The name of my show is The Rhythm of Love, and I am sharing a variety of music. Nothing from my set is from a musical I’ve done on Broadway. It will be an exploratory on the rhythm of love.” She confided that The Color Purple, though beautiful and serious, can be a downer, and that “Waiting for Life” isn’t where she is right now. “So, I’m switching to the rhythm of love,” she resolved. “The good the bad and the ugly. There will be some musical theater songs, just not from my Broadway career.” Her show will be directed by Jerry Dixon, who was Daniel to her Ti Moune. She will be joined by her long-time musical director Marco Paguia,

In earlier interviews, LaChanze lamented that there were limited acting opportunities for young black women on Broadway, always playing complex roles with serious depth, often involving physical and/or emotional trauma, and never a lighthearted role or a romantic role. “While I understand all the tragedy to which all of Black America has had to succumb, the pendulum has to swing in the other direction,” she asserted. “We all have good and bad days. Joy as well as trauma are part of our lives as living breathing human beings.”

Does working on the concert stage enable LaChanze to change that narrative?  “Absolutely,” she exclaimed. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve curated this show. Joy and laughter and the humor in life is something I take a lot of pleasure in. It’s the way I want to walk around the world. I’m an optimist, a ‘glass is half full’ kind of girl.”

LaChanze will perform The Rhythm of Love, presented by Vivo Performing Arts on Sunday, November 1, 2026, 5 PM at the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. Admission: $44-$104. To purchase tickets or for more information, click HERE.