The show stopper
'Idol' castoff Jennifer Hudson makes waves in 'Dreamgirls'
Here's a tip for anyone about to embark on a cruise: If your ship starts making like the Titanic, don't depend on the entertainment for help.
"We don't know how to save nobody. I don't even know how to swim," recalled Jennifer Hudson with a laugh about her stint as a performer on a Disney ship in 2003.
The star of the new movie musical "Dreamgirls," which opens Christmas Day, may not be able to do more than doggy paddle, but her six-month tour starring in "
"Once you get on the ship you have to do [emergency] drills with the officers," says Hudson, who apparently spent most of her childhood in Chicago anywhere but on Lake Michigan. "We had to do a 'wet' drill and I'm thinking it's going to be a little sprinkle. Honey, they took us out and hung us over the side of the ship in one of those little boats just in midair and then they made us get out at Castaway Key and hop off of a two-story cliff into the water and there's sharks in the water. I'm just floating and they're talking about 'There's sharks over there!' so I'm hollering because I can't help myself. So that was a nightmare."
But the Lord helps those who help themselves and that nightmare had a purpose. "I said, 'OK, if I can get through Disney, then I'm cut out for 'American Idol.' But if I can't I don't even need to go.' That was the only thing that made me hop off that cliff. It took about an hour to get me to jump into the water, just to get that much closer to my dream."
It was a dream the 25-year-old had nurtured since childhood. She wanted to become a singer, not unlike Jennifer Holliday, who created the role of confident, voluptuous Effie White in the original 1981 Broadway production.
"I didn't know anything about 'Dreamgirls,' " said Hudson, sitting in a Boston hotel suite. But she was a big fan of Holliday's recording of the show-stopping, pathos-drenched ballad "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." She liked it so much that she knew when she graduated from singing in the church choir with her grandmother that she wanted to play "Jennifer Holliday" on Broadway.
It wasn't until her run on "American Idol" -- she was the sixth runner-up in 2004, the season won by Fantasia Barrino -- that Hudson learned of the theatrical connection and that it would play a major role in her life.
Following her ouster from the Fox talent contest -- we blame the fact that it was Barry Manilow week -- Hudson did the summer tour associated with the show and hustled to get her own gigs for a year. Then the casting call went out for "Dreamgirls." After three auditions and a search involving 782 hopefuls, including Barrino, Hudson was handed her dream.
That's when the hard work began for someone who says acting was something that "never occurred to me, I was always going to sing."
Spirited but unfailingly polite, Hudson was put through several paces for the role. She gained 20 pounds -- "I had to gain and maintain," she says of the weight she has since lost -- to achieve Effie's fuller figure. And she studied hard in "Diva 101" under the tutelage of director Bill Condon to get to the "arrogant" core of her character.
Loosely based on the story of the Supremes, "Dreamgirls" tells the tale of powerhouse vocalist Effie (a stand-in for Florence Ballard) who is eventually overshadowed by the weaker-voiced but slimmer, more conventionally attractive Deena Jones (Knowles, in the Diana Ross-like role).
"I didn't possess that diva fireball about me," says Hudson with a good-natured shrug that clearly demonstrates that her character's demanding nature didn't splash back into her real life.
"It's so true, isn't it?" marvels Condon in a separate phone interview. "She is so sweet and not needing to be in the spotlight, and again it's the utter professionalism that Effie doesn't have that [Hudson] just finds impossible to shed, thank God."
Given her pleasing demeanor, Condon was impressed with Hudson's performance, which is generating Oscar buzz, and not just in the musical sequences. "It's clear that she is in touch somewhere with her rage. I still haven't seen it in real life but it's there obviously, and yes, it does still astonish me."
That astonishment is spreading -- including to tastemakers like Oprah Winfrey, who praised Hudson recently on her show to those in the Broadway community with fond memories of the original.
"Jennifer Holliday's performance is iconic," says Jeffrey Seller, producer of the Broadway musicals "Rent," "Avenue Q," and the recent "High Fidelity," on the phone from New York. "It's one of the great all-time performances from the Broadway stage; it is up there with Ethel Merman, and yet what Jennifer Hudson does is she brings simplicity and youthful honesty to it."
Seller calls seeing the original show as a 17-year-old on his first trip to New York City a "singular experience" and was also deeply moved by the film and Hudson's interpretation of Effie. "She's a girl with talent and self-confidence but mostly she's a girl. And I just watched her in the course of that movie become a woman. I think Bill Condon elicited a beautiful performance from her. They fell for none of the clichés of the strong-willed black woman with attitude."
Although it is Hudson's version of "And I Am Telling You" -- huskier and less unhinged than Holliday's but mighty powerful -- that has audiences cheering in the theater, Seller, like Condon, cites nonmusical moments as equally strong.
He points to a small scene when a down-on-her-luck Effie seeks help from Danny Glover's character, an aging talent manager, calling them "the two that were left behind but maintained their integrity. I just cried when I saw him open that door because I see her need."
Asked if he thinks the relative novice could find work on Broadway, Seller says with a laugh, "I'd love to have her in 'Rent' right now. I have a feeling she has something else on her agenda for the next six months including an Oscar campaign and all that other good stuff."
Hudson can't get her head around the Oscar talk but, for her, "all that other good stuff" includes recording her debut album. She hits the studio in January, working with legendary music man Clive Davis, with a tentative eye on June for a release date.
"We haven't even sat down to discuss the creative side of things as far as the type of material I'll be recording," says Hudson. "All I can promise is that it will have a lot of soul." And hopefully, she won't need a life jacket to promote it.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
