It wasn’t the first time — or the last — that David Nehls would see the legendary R&B singer Ruth Brown. Still, it might have been the most indelible.
The noted local pianist and musical director was living in New York and he and a friend were having drinks across from the storied Blue Note club when they spotted the singer waiting for her car. “My friend was like, ‘Come on,” recalled Nehls, on a recent phone call.
“He pulled me across the street, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’’ The friend asked Brown if she would take a picture with the abashed Nehls. “I was like, ‘You don’t have to. You don’t have to.’ She said, ‘You get over here and you take a picture with me right now.’”
The lesson Nehls tucked away from that encounter? Brown, who died in 2006, knew how to connect with her fans, with her audiences. That sense of connection has become the true north of the new show “Miss Rhythm — The Legend of Ruth Brown.” Written by Nehls and actor and star Sheryl McCallum, the homegrown, home-honed show opened to previews this past weekend at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Garner Galleria Theatre. A world premiere, it runs through Oct. 15.
Connection is also a recurring theme in how McCallum and Nehls came to make “Miss Rhythm,” which is based on the 1996 book “Miss Rhythm: The Autobiography of Ruth Brown, Rhythm and Blues Legend” by Brown and Andrew Yule. McCallum and Nehls first met in New York in the 1990s, reconnected in Denver a few years ago doing musical theater, and seized the opportunity that the COVID pandemic afforded them (in that “lemons, meet lemonade” way) to create the show.
Since returning from New York City to take care of her mother, Denver native McCallum has been making inroads in the area’s theater scene. In New York, she was in the Broadway cast of “The Lion King” as well as a performer in City Center’s Encores! concert series. In her first Denver show, McCallum played a town elder in the Curious Theatre Company’s production of “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet,” part of MacArthur Fellow Terrell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays.
She was cast in her first Denver Center production in 2017 when she appeared as the hooker Dolores in the playfully immersive, bathtub-gin-soaked production “The Wild Party.” She also appeared in the theater company’s well-received revival of “Oklahoma.”
Since then, McCallum’s appeared in shows at Curious, Cherry Creek Theatre, the Aurora Fox, the Arvada Center and Miners Alley. It was at that Golden theater — during artistic director Len Matheo’s much-needed Quarantine Cabaret — that McCallum and Nehls test-drove a tribute about the woman who became known as the Queen of R&B.
After a string of hit songs — “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and “5-10-15 Hours” among them — the Atlantic record label where she switched from ballads to R&B was referred to winkingly as “The House That Ruth Built.”
Brown was born Ruth Weston in Portsmouth, Va., in 1928. The young singer picked up the last name working with trumpeter Jimmy Brown. (She thought they were hitched but he was already married.) Even so, she kept the name and those initials would serve her — and popular culture — well.
Though there were many valleys, Brown scaled notable peaks in her seven decades of making music, from 1949 to 2006. There were the Atlantic years and then a fallow period. In 1988, she played the affable, segregation-challenging deejay Motormouth Mable in John Waters’ film “Hairspray.” The following year, she received the Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for her role in “Black and Blue,” a revue set in Paris between the world wars.
In 1993, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bonnie Raitt, who worked with Brown on her Rhythm and Blues Foundation efforts to recoup royalties for artists, did the honors. As Nehls can attest, Brown continued to do shows into the oughts. Her last was in 2006 in Las Vegas, where she died.
“Miss Rhythm” could easily have been one of those jukebox revues that strings the facts of an artist’s biography with hit after hit. Nehls had originally envisioned that more conventionally told tale. He even wrote one.
“He actually handed me a script with someone playing Ruth Brown,” recalled McCallum on a video chat at the end of a rehearsal day. “And I said, you know what? I do not want to play her. I don’t know if I want to do that — or can do that.” (She could have but that’s beside the point.)
“I said, ‘If I can just put it into the way that I talk and just make it that we are honoring her and paying tribute to her instead of being her.” So, McCallum tells Ruth’s story – occasionally slipping into Ruth’s shoes — but not the way a mimic would. More the way a fine storyteller might evoke a character to make her yarn that much more captivating.
It was an inventive solution, one that Nehls loves. “It’s like telling stories around the campfire, right?” he said. “You’re spreading the legend of this woman and telling the stories as opposed to acting out the stories, in some way bringing it to the most basic human interaction, and it’s cool.”
Also inviting, and vital for the area’s theater ecosystem: The production underscores the ongoing but optimistically deepening commitment on the Denver Center’s part to support accomplished area artists. “It is intentional,” wrote general manager Alicia Bruce in an email. “DCPA Cabaret has a long history of working with local talent at the Garner Galleria Theatre. We are especially excited to showcase the amount of local talent, at all levels, with this production, starting with local co-creators David and Sheryl, then Kenny (Moten) as our director, to the cast, musicians, designers and crew.”
The Garner Galleria Theatre’s cabaret stage has been transformed into a nightclub, with a warm bluish glow. From the piano, Nehls conducts a five-piece band. Still and video images are projected to augment Brown’s vast history. But at the center of it all is McCallum, sharing Ruth’s story, connecting audiences to a legend using her own fluid, formidable talents.
After that incandescent encounter in front of the Blue Note those many years ago, Nehls saw Brown perform a few more times when he was living in New York. She still had it, he thought: the voice and the will to connect.
“She did that thing where she sat in the audience at the end of the show,” Nelhs said. “After everybody is paying their checks and leaving, she’s sitting in the house saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ And, ‘What’s going on with your family?’” A note of marvel still lingers in the memory.
“She knew all these people who had been following her all these years. It’s a connection. When you listen to recordings now, you hear that she is connecting through lyric, through tone, through emotion. She’s doing all the things that music and songwriting are supposed to do. And then she took it a step further by actually getting to know you.”
Now, McCallum and Nehls will make sure you get to know her.
IF YOU GO
“Miss Rhythm — The Legend of Ruth Brown”: Written by Sheryl McCallum and David Nehls. Directed by Kenny Moten. Featuring McCallum, Nehls, William “Skip” Lynch, Dave DeMichelis, Adon Biggs and Alex Burse. At the Garner Galleria Theatre at the Denver Center for Performing Arts, 14th and Curtis streets. Through Oct. 15. For tickets: denvercenter.org and 303-893-4100.
