Also posted on San Diego News Network, sdnn.com

Calvin Manson — writer and director of the musical “Nina” — saw Nina Simone perform while he was a student at UCSD in 1972.

When it came time for the outspoken icon to sing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” she asked all the black students in the large crowd to stand up. Four stood, and she sang the song directly to them.

“I mean that right there changed my life,” Manson recalled. “I walked for months, and graduated, with my head held high thinking ‘Yes, I am young, gifted and black.’”

Afterward, at a reception following Simone’s performance, she cursed Manson out for not offering her his seat fast enough and for calling her “Nina Simone.”

“She said ‘You don’t know me. It’s Ms. Simone to you.’”

She had her moods, he said, but the way she demanded respect from people didn’t make him love her any less.

“When you listen to Donny Hathaway, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Aretha Franklin, and they’re singing their protest songs, they learned and copied and got some of that from Nina Simone,” explained Manson, the artistic director of San Diego’s Ira Aldridge Repertory Players.

“Nina” features four women playing Simone at different periods of her life: ages 16 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40 and 40 and up.

In its world premiere production, the musical will continue at San Diego’s Sunset Temple through May 23. Simone’s only child, Lisa, who’s also a singer, is expected at next Saturday’s performance.

With all four cast-members onstage at once, the Ninas have conversations with each other that delve deeper into lesser-known ups and downs of Simone’s career and personal life, including her relationships with her father, husbands, country and black America.

The production is the culmination of a five-year process of writing and research. It began in 2005 at the request of Dr. Carrol Waymon, Simone’s older brother and a San Diego resident since 1964.

“I’ve done other shows on icons like Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holiday and [writing about them] came very easy,” Manson said. ”But Nina Simone — there was so much to her. And trying to capture all of that and put it into a play, that was difficult.”

A little genius

Though she would become known as a diva, “the voice of the movement” and “the high priestess of soul,” Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon, one of eight children in the musical and religious home of John and Mary Kate Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina.

Both her parents were ministers and all eight children learned to play a musical instrument, her brother said.

When she was four, their father had surgery, and Simone served as his “little nurse.” Her father, in turn, introduced her to secular songs of the day before becoming a more devout Christian.

“They had a little private secret,” Waymon said, adding that Nina’s father told her that “‘when mom comes home from work, she’s not to know.’ So they did that for several years. He taught her on the piano and all that.”

Nina’s talent soon became apparent. Once the woman whose house her mother cleaned heard about “this little genius there across town,” she paid for Nina’s classical piano training until she was a teenager and the family moved to Philadelphia.

Simone didn’t start singing until later in life. Back in North Carolina, “she did the playing and I did the singing,” Waymon said, until he shipped off for World War II.

“That’s how I got started,” Waymon remembered. “So at about 14, I was a concert singer, and we traveled all over the place. Nina was the pianist and I was the concert singer. We had ourselves a ball.”

Simone went to New York’s Juilliard School of Music for a summer. But she left behind aspirations of being a classical pianist after failing to make the cut at another prestigious music school, Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, which she felt was the result of racism.

New name, new career

In 1954, Eunice adopted the name Nina Simone when she was hired by a club in Atlantic City. On the spot, she made up the name to conceal her new job from her parents, who would have disapproved.

It was the first time she sang, according to Waymon.

Her boss wanted her to sing and she said “I can’t sing.” He told her, “if you want the job, you have to sing.”

Five years later, she would release her first hit, her version of the song “I Loves You Porgy” from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” It would take 20 years for her mother to forgive her for singing secular music and accept her talents, though her oldest children also became musicians.

Other major hits throughout her career include “Feeling Good,” “Sinnerman,” “Four Women” and “I Put a Spell On You.”

Waymon came to San Diego in 1964, brought here by the city to run the Citizens Integration Committee, which would become the city human relations agency.

Working with a staff of 19, Waymon helped desegregate jobs, education and housing and mediated between businesses, city government and the community at a fragile and tense time in San Diego and America’s history.

More than 100 boxes of his notes, documents and tapes of historic City Hall and community meetings will be sent to archives at San Diego State University, where Waymon taught for eight years and founded the school’s Black Studies department.

Once analyzed, his archives may reveal more about important chapters in San Diego’s Civil Rights history.

Reluctantly joining the movement

At the same time that Dr. Waymon was beginning to settle in San Diego, his sister became known for protest or movement songs like “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a tribute to “A Raisin in the Sun” author and friend Lorraine Hansberry; “Mississippi Goddam,” written after the murder of activist Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham; “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, and other passionate songs at the height of the Civil Rights movement.

Waymon said that initially, his sister had no interest in getting involved in the Civil Rights movement but that ultimately she “couldn’t escape it.”

She was urged to get involved by socially conscious friends like writers Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. She was also brought up with a disgust for injustice, Waymon said.

“From day one in our family it was stressed [that you] do unto others as you’d have them do unto you,” he commented.

Waymon also pointed out that Simone inherited her father’s fire — a fact made evident when the young Simone refused to go onstage until her parents were moved from the back to the front row at a recital in a segregated building.

“She said: ‘They get a front seat, or we don’t have a concert.’ That’s the first instance we knew that she picked up daddy’s fire about being fair.”

The internationally-known Simone would later claim the Black Power movement used her up and that she was fed up with American racism. She moved to Europe in the late 1970s, came back to the U.S. in 1985 and left for good after 1991.

She was awarded an honorary degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, her childhood dream, two days before her death in 2003 at her home in the south of France. She was 70 years old.

Knowing Nina

Simone refused to be defined as a jazz musician. In an interview she once defined her music as “black classical” and her performances often fused classical, jazz, folk and her own brand of soul.

The two older Ninas in the production of “Nina,” Janice Edwards and Ayanna Hobson, are jazz singers, and said that Simone has been a part of their lives for a long time. They often sing her songs in their own shows around town.

Hobson, who plays the part of 40+ Nina, thinks of Simone’s work as more organic than other so-called divas.

The way Simone combined blues and Bach, for instance, showed the “different levels at which she operated. She had these roots that reached down into supporting humanity.”

Edwards, who portrays the 30-to-40 activist Nina, said her music “looks like my whole childhood. I’ve been knowing Nina Simone my whole life.”

In contrast, the younger Ninas, like 16-year-old Sarah Roy and Nicole Bradley, who plays her between the ages of 20 to 30, had to Google her after getting involved in the project. Bradley learned that biographers found that Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the 1960s, a fact that would remain unknown publicly until after her death.

Joshlyn Turner, 25, said most of the people she knows who are her age are familiar with Simone because contemporary rappers like Kanye West and Common borrowed portions of her songs for their own music.

She knew about Simone before but got to know her better while serving as the production’s co-director.

“I think the fact that she went so much against the grain placed her aside from everyone else and gave her that light,” she said.

Stage manager Yolanda Adams also didn’t know much about Simone. To her, both the musical and Simone’s music are intimate experiences.

“She just takes you on a journey,” said Adams, “and you go every step of the way.”

Event info

What: Ira Aldridge Repertory Players presents the world premiere production of “Nina: A Portrayal of the Life and Music of Nina Simone,” written and directed by Calvin Manson

When: Continues through May 23. Friday and Saturday dinner is at 6:30 p.m.; show at 8 p.m. Sunday matinee dinner is at 3 p.m.; show at 4 p.m.

Where: Sunset Temple, 3911 Kansas Street, San Diego

How much: $45 for dinner and show; $25 for show only. Dinner is available with reservation only

Tickets/information: (619) 283-4574; www.iarpplayers.org

Wesla Whitfield has accomplished a lot since she started singing with her sisters at four-years-old. The SF State graduate has played Carnegie Hall, sang for First Lady Hillary Clinton and performed more than 10,000 shows but today the 63-year-old counts still being able to project her voice across a room with no microphone as a major accomplishment.

“I keep paying my dues,” she said.

Whitfield grew up in a solid redwood California bungalow in the small central California beach town of Santa Maria. Her mother was a housewife and her father worked in the oil fields and getting training for a life in entertainment wasn’t always easy.

When her father broke his back working in the fields, her mother and two sisters got jobs to support the family. A lack of money meant one piano lesson to go around between the three girls so her older sister gave her piano lessons to Wesla, something she didn’t fully appreciate since it was at 7:30 in the morning but something she says she didn’t fully comprehend at nine-years-old.

“I’ve never ever failed to thank her for that,” she said. “I’m sure it was much harder than I realized as a little child for my parents to keep doing that.”

Whitfield would develop her talents through plays in middle school and high school and after a few years at Pasadena Community College, came to then San Francisco State College in the fall of 1968.

That same semester school faculty, the Black Student Union, the Third World Liberation Front and other campus organizations would begin the longest student strike in American history. They wanted to create the first college of Ethnic Studies in the nation – and she had no idea what was going on.

“It was an interesting time for me because I was screaming right-wing and so I never found out really what the strike was about,” Whitfield said, who was a Nixon supporter or Nixonette in high school.

“ …they [students] started coming into the classrooms and they would surround the whole class and we would stop cause it was really scary. And then after that the SWAT team came in and the main path was all lined with these guys in full battle gear. It was scary.”

The strike ended March 22, 1969 but it was still a time of struggle for civil rights as well as anti-war and women’s movements but Wesla stayed away from all that, instead focusing on the development of her talents and “a tiny little voice” with Drama and Dance majors.

With an era of revolt the backdrop, she says marijuana helped her realize the truths of war.

“I was so close minded. I was for the Vietnam war. My God. And I started smoking marijuana and seeing things in a different way.
And one day I was looking at Time Magazine and here was this dead body hanging off the back of a truck, it was a United States soldier and I looked at it and I finally made a connection, cause at the time I was in love with a man just about that same age and it finally came to me: war is killing people. I’m only looking at the Americans but there’s all those other people. This is wrong.”

“That was the end of my Republican days and I stopped wearing little wool plaid skirts that I made myself and here I am. That’s what dope did for me.”

“Shortly after that the light dawned on me and I went far to the left and I’ve been there ever since. I’m sorry that I don’t know what was going on.”

The end of the 1960s would also signal the opening of new on-campus dorms. Wesla moved into Verducci Hall, demolished in 1989 after sustaining considerable damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

“I had everything I needed.”

“…and I could see the sun set over the little bridge by the lake. It was a wonderful existence.”

Her two majors would be her main focus but in her off time, Whitfield made trips with friends to the opera or symphony.
“I had season tickets for the nosebleed sections of the opera house and I saw every opera, every season.”

After school, Wesla began working for the San Francisco Opera as a salary chorister, then a singing cocktail waitress and other part-time work to keep afloat until she could sing full-time.

In 1977, while walking home from a rehearsal Wesla was shot several times by a 10 and a 12-year-old, paralyzing her from the waist down.

A year later, her first gig back from “being laid low” was to perform between sets at the Empire Plush Room’s New Years Eve celebration. Throngs of local media would show up to see her return to form, though she says it was a struggle, with no lights, no microphone.

“Everybody kind of listened for a minute and just went on talking. It was horror.”

The Plush Room would become her favorite venue and she would perform the New Years Eve show the next 28 years straight until it closed shortly after New Years in 2008.

Last year she marked a noteworthy milestone, spending half her life in a wheelchair and half walking, something thats brought both pain and lessons.

“I have learned through becoming disabled to see people beyond the superficial in terms of the first impression. I’ve learned that it’s going to be there.

I still have to go through all the hoops and all the things I had in my brain for the first 30 years but once I manage to put them aside I think I see people much more easily and I connect with them much more easily than I ever would have if I hadn’t become disabled.”

Her partner along the way through the shows and 18 albums has been Michael Greensill, who she met in 1982 when she needed a piano player and he needed work.

“We were very proper cause he was still married so we just did nothing about that but it was too great, he couldn’t fight it, cause I’m such a catch,” she said in a sarcastic tone. “And so he left his wife for me. It was just extraordinary.”

The two have now been married more than 26 years.
Greensill’s background in jazz has had an influence on her but Whitfield only performs songs from the Great American songbook, the kind of music you heard from artists like Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra, Billy Holiday and Nina Simone.

“We are dinosaurs,” she said, something she is proud of. Because all the songs are about the story and the human condition, she said, they are timeless.

“People still fall and love. People still get their heart broken. People live happily ever after.”

They have hopes and dreams and goals and ambitions that are met or not met and the great american popular song deals with those things.”

These days, Whitfield and Greensill don’t perform shows all over the world but spend the majority of their time marketing weekend shows at Silo’s at the Napa River Inn in Napa.