[Theatre and Physical Theatre – Music/International] Black Is The Color Of My Voice Adelaide College Of The Arts, Fri 15 Mar, 2024. Apphia Campbell has crafted a wonderful and wonder-filled work to introduce us to the life, art, and voice of Nina Simone. The stage is a room in which Nina is mourning the loss of her father – she has given herself three days to come to terms with this loss. In her reflections we’re led through the major stages and happenings of her life, from being a child prodigy, aiming at being a classical concert pianist, to ‘singing for the devil’ in jazz clubs, making a career work, and becoming the voice of the civil rights movement in the USA. While Nina is reliving her life and times for us, in conversation with her father, we also get glimpses of her mother, wonderfully portrayed as an upright Christian mum, which was done standing up and bending over on the bed looking down on the smaller Nina. The stage was a rather spacious hotel room, a bed, a little desk with a disconnected phone and a photo of her dad on it. At the end of the bed is a small trunk of keepsakes which is the source of many of the memories and scenes that are acted out – all part of the process of making peace with her beloved father, but from whom she had become estranged. It is a creative and very effective method to tell the story. Apphia is an accomplished actress and story teller. Apphia is also a gifted singer and we’re treated to a more modest selection of Nina songs than I was expecting, but each is delivered beautifully. And when Nina plays her mum singing an old gospel song swaying and gesticulating as every bit of her becomes her mother – it’s a real treat. Any ground-breaking activist songwriter with friends like the Black Panthers on one hand and Martin Luther King (MLK) on the other are likely to have some difficult times with the establishment and white power people along the way. We were treated to the momentous times of the MLK I have a dream speech, JFK’s assassination and then the complete heartache of MLK’s passing in a similar manner. Throughout this time estrangement from her father and coping with a husband who was a violent abuser further colour this story. Nina takes us through her three days of mourning, from the worst of the darkness with the civil rights movement temporarily in tatters and emerges triumphant – reconciled and ready to live and sing again. It’s not a tribute act, it’s not musical theatre in the classical sense, rather it’s a one woman tour de force as Apphia brings Nina Simone to life right there before our eyes!