All of Her Heart and Soul

As a struggling theater student, Kirsten Childs found herself miscast in her real-life role as a secretarial temp. On the subway to work each day, she says, “I often wondered how many other people wanted to scream their heads off like I did. It would be pretty powerful. We would have blown the subway out with our scream.”

But she kept her emotions to herself, just as she had most of her life. Adapting to her environment had worked for her since her childhood, when she was a confused “bubbly black girl” in Los Angeles playing with her blond, blue-eyed Chatty Cathy doll.

Childs’ pent-up feelings are at the heart of her musical, “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin.” Written and directed by Childs, it opens at Playwrights Horizons here Tuesday starring LaChanze. The coming-of-age musical borrows heavily from Childs’ experiences growing up in Los Angeles’ racially mixed neighborhoods, then heading off to New York to become a dancer and, along the way, learning to be more comfortable with herself.

“I really want the world to know what it was like for little black girls who were born around the same time as I was,” says Childs, who grew up in Los Angeles in the ‘60s. “I wanted to express the contradiction of trying to live your life in black and white America and what an impossible task it was to align those two worlds. Yet everyone expected you to do it, and they did not want to hear how schizophrenic you were about it.

“What you wanted to express of yourself would not be prudent for the black community or it would be a little too much for the white community. It just was such a frustrating prospect to think what I could be in this world because one way or another it was going to be stifled. Or I felt like I needed to stifle it.”

She’s not stifling much in “Bubbly Black Girl.” In a dream sequence, heroine Viveca Stanton is chased by the Ku Klux Klan; in a dance class, a teacher admonishes a black boy to “act your age and not your color!” Stanton’s confessions to her white talking doll, here called a Chitty Chatty doll, include her wish that the prince “come and rescue me from this evil, awful spell that a wicked witch has cast upon me.”

It’s a tough message, but Childs is an engaging messenger. Visiting with a reporter in a Playwrights Horizons office, the 5-foot-9 former Broadway dancer tells her life story and musical plot line almost simultaneously, acting out this or that moment, laughing at herself and commenting on what she’s saying with body language, hand gestures, sometimes a song lyric.

Her musical comes in the same bright wrapping. Humor and upbeat music leaven things from the first scene, set in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, where sweet Viveca introduces herself as Bubbly, waves at the audience, flashes a winning smile and reminds everyone out there to have a nice day.

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Childs was raised near Culver City in a house in which her mother still lives.

Her schoolteacher parents early on instilled their love of music in her and her younger brother, Billy Childs, a Los Angeles-based pianist and composer. Childs, who declined to give her age, was named after legendary Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad “because my father loved her voice. Our parents were very well-read and had eclectic literary and musical tastes. They exposed us to classical music, Sinatra, Belafonte, Lena Horne, the Hi-Los, jazz and a cappella singers. We kids discovered Aretha Franklin, Motown and the Beatles.”

They also discovered harsh realities of racism. For Childs, “the pivotal point” was the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that resulted in the deaths of four black girls. “It really told me it was unsafe to be a little black girl in this world because you’re not even safe in church.

“As a child, your faith is like a rock. You believe that God is good and that certain things are sacred,” she says. “Those times were so turbulent. You would see people on television snapped at by dogs and see people’s faces twisted with hate. You’re frightened and don’t understand why someone should hate you, but one thing you’re holding onto is that there’s going to be something to protect you. That someone would actually bomb a church--which was the symbol of safety and sanctity--just meant that there were no rules.”

Some respite came when Childs went from an elementary school that was predominantly black to a junior high school that was predominantly white. “There was that fear of meeting people who are different from you and then realizing they’re not so different,” she says. “When you were in school, it was like this laboratory experiment of goodwill.

“We would do these wonderful fun dances in the girls’ gym. It was such a United Nations of girls, all doing these dances together. Everybody was laughing and having a good time. And I remember it as being a lovely time in my life when I wasn’t worried about everything.”

That school gym and its dances are re-created in Childs’ show, which follows her adventures to New York to pursue a dance career. In real life, she detoured to UC Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied French. But her passion was modern dance. Within a year or so of arriving in New York, she auditioned successfully for the national tour of the musical “Chicago” and later understudied Chita Rivera.

Childs performed on Broadway in “Dancin’,” then toured with that show and “Chicago” until, in 1985, she got to perform opposite Rivera in Atlantic City. Soon after, she appeared in Broadway’s “Jerry’s Girls” and the revival of “Sweet Charity.”

Childs went to acting school, finished and was immediately cast as Richard Pryor’s sister in the 1989 film “See No Evil, Hear No Evil.” But again the real world intruded, this time with her father’s cancer and subsequent death and the illness and death of several close friends. “That set me spiraling down, down, down,” Childs says. “It was time for me to take a break. I saw ghosts everywhere, and I just couldn’t handle it.”

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In 1990, Childs became a secretarial temp, then a “diversity trainer,” teaching corporate managers how to be more sensitive to employee issues of gender and race. But she was also attending New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program and, sometimes, writing lyrics set to her brother Billy’s music for such performers as jazz singer Dianne Reeves.

By 1995, Childs was writing her own music as well, and those first songs eventually led to “Bubbly.” She performed her songs first at a poetry reading in the East Village and in time wrote what she calls “a fairy tale connecting the dots” from song to song. “Bubbly” began to take shape as a theater piece.

While Childs initially felt that only she could perform her story, she became aware of its universality. “People used to come up to me, and they’d say, ‘That’s my story.’ And they weren’t all black women. They were white men. Black men. White women. Asian men. I knew that if there were that many people relating to it, it didn’t have to be me performing it.”

A childhood friend, author Walter Mosley, suggested she turn her piece into a book musical, as did friend Gordon Greenberg, who helped her put it on at Musical Theatre Works’ “Fresh Voices” series. From there, “Bubbly” moved on to such institutions as Manhattan Theatre Club, the O’Neill Theater Center’s 1998 National Music Theater Conference and now Playwrights Horizons. Childs won the prestigious Edward Kleban Award for Lyrics; “Bubbly” received a 1999 Richard Rodgers Development Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2000 Richard Rodgers Production Award.

Interest was particularly high at the O’Neill. Ira Weitzman, first head of Playwrights Horizons’ musical theater program, called artistic director Tim Sanford within an hour of seeing Childs’ show. Actor Jeff McCarthy, performing in another show at the O’Neill, similarly called his wife, Wind Dancer Theatre producer Pamela Perrell McCarthy, and insisted she come see the show.

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Other potential producers also came forward, but Childs eventually settled on an agreement with Playwrights and Wind Dancer. Playwrights did a workshop production of “Bubbly” in its 72-seat Studio Theater in spring 1999 before deciding to produce the show in its larger Anne G. Wilder Theater.

“I was just blown away by her extraordinary and unique talent,” producer McCarthy says. “She was saying some really difficult, challenging and bold things. With her humor and incredible gift for words and music, she was addressing something very taboo, and people were laughing. White audiences feel a little uncomfortable, and when there’s a mixture in the audience of African Americans and whites, it’s much more relaxed. She’s giving people permission to break the ice and look at this universal issue of seeing beyond someone’s skin.”

“Bubbly” appealed to Sanford’s passion for shows whose scores reflect pop music or have clear-sounding American idioms. “There’s music in ‘Bubbly Black Girl’ you could take straight to an FM radio station,” Sanford says. “It really excites me to hear music that sounds contemporary that works in a musical theater context.

“The lyrics are active, descriptive of character and filled with action. Her musical palette is so broad that it gives her incredible flexibility in doing the storytelling.”

That’s key to a show about somebody who, like Childs, considered continual adaptation the answer to survival. “The chameleon blues are basically the woe that you experience deep inside from feeling powerless to express who you truly are,” she says. “On the outside, you’re giving people exactly what they want to see, even if you don’t agree with what they are asking you to do.

“I learned the chameleon blues in L.A. and really refined them in New York. Yet what I also learned in L.A. is ‘the smile,’ which sometimes doesn’t work to your advantage. But when you really feel it, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s not ‘smile like a buffoon’; it’s smile with dignity. It’s that lunch counter type of smile: It may take me a long time, but I’m going to win.”

The playwright is now working on a romantic musical set against the transition of Times Square from seedy to glamorous. Mosley has outlined the musical’s book, says Childs, who plans to work on it this summer at the O’Neill. Also underway are a short musical piece for the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., this fall and one with her brother, Billy.

Although “Bubbly” began as a largely autobiographical show, Childs doesn’t think it is anymore. “I really refer to it now as the journey of this one black woman from childhood to adulthood. Viveca has taken on a life of her own. One thing that gives me comfort is that there are a lot of black women who obviously, from these auditions we’ve been having, really understand this woman very well.”