'Memphis' at a music crossroads

Singing actor Felicia Boswell has played a battery of high-profile roles in her career, including Aida in "Aida," Mimi in "Rent" and Dorothy in "The Wiz."

None of those parts has hit as close to home as Felicia Farrell, the female lead Boswell plays in "Memphis," although decades separate the actor and her character's 1950s milieu.

"There are a lot of parallels between the character Felicia and me," she said by phone from Cleveland, where "Memphis" was playing last week. "We're both from the South and both have big dreams of recording. We both date outside our race. And we are firm believers in equality."

The show, whose four Tonys in 2010 included one for best musical, opens Tuesday at St. Paul's Ordway Center. Composed by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, who co-wrote lyrics with book writer Joe DiPietro, "Memphis" is set in the South in the 1950s, when segregation was enforced by law and mob violence.

Illiterate white DJ Huey Calhoun (Bryan Fenkart) plays music by black artists on the radio, an act of radical inclusion. The performers whose records he spins include singer Felicia Farrell, an aspiring recording star who wants to break out of Memphis. The singer and the DJ fall in love, an affection so potentially dangerous that they seek to keep it a secret.

The musical tells a story of love and dreams against a backdrop of racial straits. It is set in a city and an era when music by black artists was being heard by and sold to white audiences, despite segregation.

"In the 1940s, there were only three main markets in the music industry -- pop, race music and hillbilly," said Yolanda Y. Williams, who teaches a course on black music at the University of Minnesota. "But white people appreciated the race music that blacks made, not just the cover versions by white acts. So Jerry Wexler, who was then at Billboard, coined the term rhythm and blues as a more sophisticated label. Later, deejay Alan Freed coined the term rock and roll to be even more inclusive."

"It's where all the musical streams came together," she said, "including blues, rockabilly, vaudeville and jazz. Elvis came out of there and later the soul movement of Stax Records."

On the cusp

The 1950s, stretching from the postwar years to the tumultuous '60s, have held endless fascination for storytellers. The integration-and-music-themed narrative of "Hairspray," for example, is similar to that of "Memphis."

Boswell said that at the personal level, her current character "is similar to Aida, who loves across battle lines. And Felicia is feisty like Mimi [in 'Rent'] and has the innocence of Dorothy [in 'The Wiz']."

Boswell, one of the backup singers in the 2009 Guthrie Theater production of "Caroline, or Change," said she appreciated the city's musical legacy. She was born into a singing family in Montgomery, Ala., scene of so much historic racial violence, including the catalytic 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Her family was active in struggles for equality and freedom. Civil rights icon Rosa Parks is a relative.

"I've been in the business since I was 5 or 6," she said. "My family had a gospel group [John Boswell and the True Sounding Boswellettes] and we'd sing on a Christian radio station every Sunday." She started acting around 9, intending to become a recording artist as well as a star of film and TV.

"I don't remember a time when I was not performing," she said. "This is what I was called to do."

Geographic differences

The tour started in Memphis in October. Since then, Boswell has noticed differences in audiences by geography.

"We haven't been to the Deep South yet, to those places where people might still be really uncomfortable with a black woman and white man showing affection for each other onstage," she said. "But in Clearwater and Naples [Fla.], where the audience was predominantly Caucasian and older, they weren't gasping, but they showed their discomfort by not reacting at all. Their silence was loud."

"Canadians didn't have the same experience of race as we did, so it was shocking that a word that's ugly to the depths of your soul in certain parts of Alabama or Mississippi or Texas got no reaction there," she said.

No matter, "it's a necessary story to tell," she continued. "People need to see how far we've come as a nation."

She said that she hopes the show inspires audiences to act for what is right today -- some have told her so.