IN REAL LIFE

A happy, intelligent, artistic African-American girl from upstate New York heads to the Big Apple to make it to the big time in the late 1970s. What could've been easier? In this wonderfully energetic and warmly humorous one-woman show, Charlayne Woodard takes us on a tour of the Lower East Side, doing perfect impressions of her worried mother, her upper-middle-class white boyfriend, a shaman-like Rastafarian, and all the characters she comes to love in the cast of "Ain't Misbehavin'." The audio's belly-laugh showstopper may be Woodard's innocently sincere rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" as her musical audition piece. Woodard's tremendous talent as a writer and performer are apparent in every second of this live recording. B.P. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2015]