Candice Harper: Pretty is Sooo Important

Once again, the Duplex has provided a stage and a chance for an up-and-coming young singer to make her bow on a venerable stage. Candice Harper's one-woman show Pretty Is Sooo Important recently ended its two-performance run at the popular venue, and gave her the opportunity to show off her impressive range as a singer, actress, and writer.

Less a cabaret and more a performance piece, Pretty is Sooo Important intersperses jazz and R&B standards with monologues about the women in Ms. Harper's family, and their thoughts and style and beauty. Ms. Harper plays the many disparate women in the family with loving warmth and humor, capturing their essences without mocking their ideals. Her aunt manipulates beaux into buying her fancy clothes. Her grandmother, with the no-nonsense sharpness only an eighty-year-old black woman can have, defends her life and lifestyle with righteous pride. Her sister triumphs over the challenges of raising a deaf child with cerebral palsy, while her mother can only say of the baby, "At least she's pretty." No values are held up to ridicule, and none of the ladies is presented as right or wrong in her opinions. Ms. Harper merely shares stories and lets the audience draw their own conclusions.

Ms. Harper's song selections nicely punctuate each monologue, weaving easily through the stories until they form a cohesive whole, everything unique and contributing in its own way. A jazz number by Harry Warren flows easily into a sensual Prince ballad, and a popular folk music standard becomes a sing-along for the audience. Ms. Harper has a lovely, versatile voice that can just as easily evoke modern R&B divas as the jazz greats of the 40's.

In one of the show's most hilarious and triumphant moments, Ms. Harper talks of playing a Boylan sister in her grade school's production of Annie. When she complained to the drama teacher/director of being forced to wear a blonde wig for the role, she was dismissed with the offensive answer that there were no black women on radio in the 1930's, and she would therefore have to play white. (In reality, plenty of African-American female jazz singers of the '30's regularly performed in blonde wigs. The truth might not have been any more palatable, but it would at least have been in the spirit of education and black history.) Snapping a flower into her hair to honor Billie Holiday, Ms. Harper wittily saluted the many great female singers of the past seventy years with a parody of her big number in Annie, "You've Always Been the Best Thing on the Dial."

Blessed with a voice equally suited to every kind of song, the ability to step effortlessly from one character to another, and an emotionally involving story to share, Candice Harper and her show are certainly worth attention. With any luck, she will make frequent returns and share her family's stories with more audiences.

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