INTERVIEW: Memories of ‘Summer’ live on
Top photo: Storm Lever performs with the company of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by BBB with permission.
Donna Summer’s catalog of music is one of the most impressive in the history of pop, disco and R&B. Whether it’s “Hot Stuff” or “Last Dance” or “Love to Love You Baby,” the songs have provided musical accompaniment for decades, and they show no sign of slowing down in popularity.
Summer: The Donna Summer Musical celebrates the disco diva on Broadway, with a 90-minute show that offers highlights of the singer’s career and the many personal struggles she overcame to rise to the top. Uniquely, the production casts three actors as Summer, each representing a different stage in her life.
LaChanze, a Tony winner for The Color Purple, plays Diva Donna, while Ariana DeBose (A Bronx Tale) plays Disco Donna. Storm Lever, who is making her Broadway debut, plays Duckling Donna, the youngest version of the iconic singer.
“I have been working on this production for two years now, and in 2016, we did a workshop version of it here at the off-Broadway space, Signature, in New York,” Lever said in a recent phone interview. “We did an eight-week workshop in the summer then. Then I did a couple projects in between and was called up after working on a show with our choreographer, [Sergio Trujillo]. I just finished doing a project with him, and opening night he comes into my dressing room and says, ‘There’s a surprise you’re going to get later on today.’ And my agents called me that day to tell me that the show is going to move and be done in La Jolla, [California,] for an out-of-town tryout, so I did it in La Jolla last September until December. And at the end of that process, I got the phone call to ask if I wanted to do it on Broadway.”
Lever, of course, said, “Yes.”
A few months after that phone call, she was getting ready for her big debut at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. There were many emotions running through her mind the evening of her first performance.
“I had a lot of friends in the audience — a girl I had been living with since our sophomore year of college, friends I had met in the city, family members — and it was just people that had been seeing me do this for a really long time and hearing that I wanted to do this for a really long time,” Lever said. “And to have the lights come up and to see not only them but then a houseful of … people that are also interested in what you have to say and interested in the story that you’re about to tell, that feeling is unlike any. It’s such a rush, and it’s also just a confirmation of you’re in the right place. You’re telling the right story. I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I grew up studying pop music and different pop voices in my voice lessons, and then went on to get into theater and get into dance, and it’s everything that I’ve worked on coming to fruition. It was the perfect debut.”
Lever has been listening to Summer’s music her entire life. Songs like “On the Radio” and “Heaven Knows” have provided so many memories for so many fans, and Lever counts herself as one of them.
“She’s one of those artists that I didn’t even realize that I was basically her number one fan,” Lever said with a laugh. “When we came into the first day of the workshop, and I got the song list, there’s probably only two songs of the 24 that we sing in the show that I wasn’t terribly familiar with. The rest were hit after hit after hit, and I grew up in a house where my mother was constantly changing up who we were listening to. And Donna Summer was definitely a repeat play in our home. We listened to different albums going to school because we had a long commute back then, and to do our Saturday morning chores, she’d always put on an album to get us motivated. I remember hearing all these songs to make any mundane activity a party, and that’s what her music is. You’re mopping the floor, and somehow it becomes the funnest activity in the world because the beat is so good. It sounds so good. I very much grew up with Donna Summer.”
Lever’s portrayal of the younger Summer isn’t all disco music and dancing. Summer had to overcome many difficult obstacles throughout her childhood and in the early days when she was attempting to break into the music industry.
A metaphor about Summer’s life helped Lever find the character and accurately portray her on stage. It goes something like this: Life is like a home, and Summer could be found not looking at the portraits or the mirrors, but out the window.
“If we’re going to shape this woman, and there’s three versions of us, I need to first paint my own portrait,” she said. “What is this version of her? What am I trying to convey in this time of her life? What’s important to show the audience at this time in her life? So that started out with me reading her biography that she wrote called Ordinary Girl and then getting my hands on any bit of videos I could get of her, articles that I could find of her, any piece of information of things that came out of her mouth, so you can get in her head a little bit. So I went through and had notebooks filled with all the information that I had found on this woman.”
Lever was fascinated by the fact that so many people depict Summer as this glamorous woman, but that is now how she acted in her personal life. That’s not necessarily who she aspired to be.
“She thought of herself as quite ordinary and nothing special for a lot of her life, and was incredibly awkward, incredibly shy and soft spoken when she was younger, so I got to focus on this part of her that you didn’t get to see later in her life when she became famous,” Lever said. “So after I did all that digging, I then when to Ariana and LaChanze, my two other co-stars that play Disco Donna and Diva Donna, and we got together and talked about our different findings and then talked about, OK, what’s the core of this woman?”
Lever added: “We’re not trying to mimic her. We’re not trying to be just like her. We’re trying to find her essence of what made her her, and so that was dinner after hangout after meeting after phone call after text conversation between the three of us of the different things that we found or different things that we wanted to try in rehearsal that day. It was a long process that did really take from the workshop two years ago to La Jolla to us rehearsing for the Broadway production to even now if we hear something interesting or we meet somebody that has more information, we’re still taking notes and swapping notes because it’s live theater. It can be ever-growing, and this woman is a woman [who is] with us every night. We want her to live on, so we have to make sure her essence stays fresh and stays alive.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Summer: The Donna Summer Musical is currently playing the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
