LEILANI JONES TO SHOUT UP NEW SHOW

She won a Tony award last year for her portrayal of a 1930s Chicago stripper in the musical “Grind.” But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever catch Leilani Jones on stage in less than a bathing suit.

The Hawaiian-born actress said she has never compromised the moral “centeredness” her Catholic upbringing gave her, although she has been faced with the usual show-business temptations in her quick rise to fame.

“I’ve been very fortunate, or very blessed, depending on one’s point of view,” said the actress, who will admit only to being somewhere in her “mid-20s” because she says she’s lost jobs by being too honest about her age.

Jones will appear, beginning next Tuesday, at the La Jolla Playhouse in a new musical, “Shout Up a Morning,” with a jazz score by the late Julian (Cannonball) Adderly and his brother Nat. It is being staged by Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, with book by Paul Avila Mayer and George W. George, lyrics by Diane Charlotte Lampert and Peter Farrow.

“I got the first job I auditioned for in New York. That was a non-union show. I went directly from that into an ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’ tour (and) I got my union card,” she said. “I mean, some people are in New York for years, trying to get their card, and I was there for a few months and got my card. I think I perhaps moved to New York at the tail end of a time when it was good to be a black ingenue type.”

Soon enough the University of Hawaii graduate had an agent and was going through call-back auditions for a leading part in a feature film. That was when the first moral dilemma arose.

“Some awful things were happening (to this character). She got raped twice, (there was) partial nudity in this shower scene and there were drugs and all this kind of stuff. I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to do this,’ but you know, one would need to have that type of a credit to move on in one’s career, so I gave the script to Dorothy (Scott, her agent) and I said, ‘Dorothy, could you read this and tell me what you think of it?’

“She came back the next morning and she said, ‘We can’t do this! I know your parents!’ I just felt such relief. . . . It was just not something that I would want to present myself as, and Dorothy was like, ‘No. There’s something better coming along.’ ”

That “something better” turned out to be a Broadway musical directed by Harold Prince.

“ ‘Grind’ was my very first Broadway show. When I was auditioning for it, I just wanted to get in the show. I wasn’t asking to be the lead,” Jones said. “I just kept thinking, there’s no way I’m going to get this. I mean, why would they pick this little 5-foot-2 shrimp when they can have one of these gorgeous, glamorous leading Broadway lady types?

“The rehearsal process and working on it was so--traumatic is a big word, but if you can just imagine doing your first Broadway show, and having them give you the lead, for crying out loud, and you’re like, “Oh God, oh God, I don’t want to be terrible, I want to be good, and you’re just working so hard and you’re just really nervous and so unsure--it was that type of experience,” she said.

“I don’t look like a stripper. But maybe they saw that she should be a person first who just happens to do this for a living, as opposed to a hard, bump-and-grind, hard-knocks woman. You can see the girl in her, and then you feel for what happens to her in the story.”

And there was no nudity required for the role, something Jones said no actress ever needs to submit to.

“If you’ve really got talent, you don’t have to do that type of thing, you know. It’s the people that can’t do anything else but take off their clothes that take off their clothes.”

In “Shout Up a Morning,” Jones plays a 16-year-old girl, part of an extended black family trying to gather itself together in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation to make their way to Mississippi, where 40 acres and a mule are promised.

Interwoven with this realistic tale is the popular legend of John Henry, the man who pitted himself against the steam drill and won--and who, in “Shout Up a Morning,” falls in love with Jones’ character, Carolina.

“So many things happen to her that she goes from this happy, innocent sort of effect to . . . death and desolation,” Jones said. “It’s the type of a musical that’s not just people jumping up and down and singing and tra-la-la. It’s got some meat to it.”