‘Sweet Songs’ Help Sustain Moore in Troubled Times

Melba Moore is a very dramatic singer. She can turn on a dime between registers and volume levels. Her superb breath control enables her to hold difficult notes forever.

As both singer and storyteller, she knows how to move, when to emphasize this word or that. She can impersonate a wide variety of the other women in her life and make them come alive. She’s funny.

With all these gifts, Moore could still benefit from a writer. The text of her “Sweet Songs of the Soul,” at West Angeles Christian Arts Theatre, is superficial and self-serving instead of self-searching.

Moore sings frequently throughout the evening, accompanied by the skilled Levi Barcourt, so the show provides a pleasurable experience, even though Moore is overmiked. She still looks as if she could be in her 20s instead of her 50s, which is remarkable, considering some of the unhappy times she relates.

The first act is about her childhood. Absent parents leave her lonely, but surrogates fill in as well as they can. Her low point is a molestation by a relative, but when her mother marries again and Moore becomes part of a real family, her joy transcends the act’s darker tones, especially in a sensationally stylish rendition of “Blue Skies.”

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The second act skips lightly through her adult years, trying to cover too much. She touches on her career-making roles in “Hair” and “Purlie,” then speeds through her years of greatest fame (the first of two TV series is glanced at, but a second one--canceled after only one episode--goes unmentioned). Soon she reaches her years of woe earlier in this decade, when she was rendered nearly penniless, she says, by a husband/manager who exploited her fame and then left her. From her account, she was totally surprised by this turn of events.

She describes how she called the media to cover her on the day she applied for welfare, with no reflection on how this is an option not open to most welfare applicants and no clear word on whether she actually relied on the welfare. Moore credits prayer for helping her back up, though, fortunately, the show never becomes sanctimonious.

There are no programs; the songwriters go uncredited.

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* “Sweet Songs of the Soul,” West Angeles Christian Arts Center, 3045 Crenshaw Blvd., tonight-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 3 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m. $16.50-$27.50. (213) 733-8707. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.