La Mama
74A E. Fourth St.
btwn. Bowery & Second Ave.
Jun.1-10
Fri.-Sat. 10 p.m.; Sun. 5:30 p.m.
$18; allherfaces.com
A few years ago, to hear Anthony Inneo tell it, he was standing inside the theater at La Mama when he was seized by the spirit of Dusty Springfield.
"I just felt it," the playwright and longtime "Chorus Line" veteran said in an interview in his sprawling Hell's Kitchen apartment. 'It was like a chill down my spine. 'Dusty should be here!'"
Five years later, on Friday, June 1, Inneo's vision is becoming a reality with the opening of "All Her Faces," a romantic fantasy starring Sean Jenness as a young man obsessed by Springfield, the 1960-1970s British mistress of "blue-eyed soul."
This year is seeing an explosion of renewed interest in the singer, who died in 1999. Two other plays - one the Australian hit "Dusty, the Original Pop Diva" - are waiting to open in London theaters, Kristin Chenoweth will star in a 2009 biopic, and YouTube is overflowing with clips of the platinum-haired, dark-eyeliner beauty, including 1963's earthy cover of Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness" on the ITV show "Ready Steady Go!," a 1968 diva trilling "Son of a Preacher Man," and the '80s Pet Shop Boys tune that introduced her to Generation X, 'What Have I Done to Deserve This?"
Inneo admits to being a source of some of those YouTube clips - but not, he insisted, for the same reason as anybody else.
"Everybody's stuck on the biography," he said. And he admits that biography is compelling. "Here you had this Catholic girl, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien. She was suicidal. She was a cutter. She invented mod, she developed an aura of the platinum blonde teased wig, the dark sunglasses, the black eyeliner. She abused alcohol. She admitted she was a bisexual, and it became clear later that she was a lesbian."
Between the mod aura and her open secret girlfriends, Springfield became something of a gay icon in England, a status cemented after her death by an April 1999 Advocate profile that began, "She gave herself completely to her music and to the women she loved. She was our diva. This is her story."
To Inneo, all of the above is beside the point. Springfield's oversize persona, he said, has obscured the reason she was famous in the first place - her singular voice, a gutsy alto that poured out over 45 records all over the world. His show, he said, is "all about that voice."
"All Her Faces" features Jenness, veteran of the Broadway and traveling productions of "Hair" and The Who's "Tommy," as a young man named Jesse, who discovers Springfield's voice while visiting his father. Jesse pours the tunes from .45 singles into his iPod, becoming more and more drawn in, until he is singing selected Springfield tunes right along with her. By the end, says Inneo, "Dusty is not on stage - and yet she is."
Inneo first heard Springfield in the early 1960s, when he was a busy young working actor, staying at short-term flops in Greenwich Village, studying with "Sandy" (Meisner) at the first New York school run by Richard Burton's father Philip, and taking in what everyone else was doing.
"We had Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park - before he was a star." He was also a baby rock and roller, he said, and listened naturally to Martha and the Vandellas. "I thought, we all thought, no way is that a white girl. But it was!"
Inneo first thought of a musical tribute to Springfield upon the singer's death in 1999, but said he gave it up because "No one can imitate that voice. Streisand you can imitate - but not her." His epiphany at La Mama came a few years later, soon after the moderate success of his drama "Evaluating Woody" at the Mint Space on West 43rd Street. He "took myself out of it," and made the central character male because "no one can be her!"
Jenness, who has his own rock and roll band, was chosen because "I didn't want stage voices. I wanted someone who can rock out!"
While all of the music is Dusty's, Inneo gives score credit to musical director Jo Lynn Burks, who has toured with Gladys Knight and Roger Daltrey and is now in the orchestra for The Color Purple on Broadway.
"When I showed her the sheet music," said Inneo, "and asked if she wanted to do it - she looked at me and said 'Honey, this is what I do!'" At press time, Burks was still adding layers to the show's sound, while also singing in the show's chorus, nicknamed the "Rainbow Coalition."
The name of the ensemble, like the show itself, is a tribute to the biography not explicitly in the show, when Springfield refused to perform in venues or stay in hotels that blocked her African-American colleagues. Her bravery, said Inneo, is part of the "Dusty spirit" he plans to revive with the show, bravery that too often has been as forgotten as her voice.
Pointing out that Dusty's stratospheric career slowed only in 1970, after she told a British magazine that she was bisexual, the avowedly apolitical playwright sat back, with a sigh.
"I feel that when an artist is blacklisted, for what they believe politically," he said "or what their sexual orientation is, it is the biggest crime in the world."
