No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone

Singer, songwriter, and civil-rights activist Nina Simone is back—and she is dissatisfied. Raleigh playwright Howard L. Craft’s off-Broadway production of Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green garnered a New York Times critics pick in 2017. But five years before that, a commission for a brief stage work first made Craft wonder what the outspoken vocalist, whose protest songs, including “Mississippi Goddam,” moved H. Rap Brown to call her “the singer of the Black Revolution” decades before her 2003 death, would say—and sing—about the world as it is now. Nina Simone: No Fear and Blues Long Gone, expands Craft’s early take into an evening-length work. In it, Simone is back for a strictly limited engagement: one night only, with a hot live trio and nothing to lose. Craft calls the work “a musical journey that touches on seminal moments in her life” in which the High Priestess of Soul weighs-in on current events. Noted regional actor and jazz singer Yolanda Rabun plays Simone; Kathryn Hunter-Williams directs this one-week production, the season-opener for PlayMakers Rep’s PRC2 second-stage series.