NaTasha Yvette Williams
|
Age: 37
Hometown: Fayetteville, North Carolina, though Williams has lived in New York for the past 11 years. Early thoughts of a career as a math professor gave way to a desire to perform that has now encompassed both sides of the Atlantic as well as three CDs, the latest of which, “[and] actually my best one,” is called Every Child.
Currently: At the New London Theatre playing Mammy in the West End musical Gone with the Wind, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Jill Paice as Scarlett O’Hara and Darius Danesh as Rhett Butler. “I’ve done new productions but not on this scale and of this magnitude,” says Williams, who got some of the show’s best reviews for the gradual hold she exerts over a long night. Not that Williams has read her notices. “I started reading the reviews and came upon one and it was harsh, very harsh, so I stopped. I didn’t even get to my part; I just couldn’t,” she admits. “I’m told people were kind to me, and I am grateful for that. The press has the opportunity and the responsibility to say whatever they feel, but I’m just hoping people will come and make the decision for themselves.” Did Nunn alert the company to the possibility of poor reviews? “Not directly, but he sort of warned us and said, ‘Look, I love you,’ and this is the show I want to present. You have to believe in it no matter what anyone says.’”
Gone with the Wind's
NaTasha Yvette Williams and Jill Paice
|
Frankly My Dear: Williams does give a damn about making her U.K. stage debut in Gone With the Wind—a gig that also represents her first-ever time in London: “It’s an honor to be in the production, and to be in another country which is totally different and just the same,” she laughs, admitting to a hankering after good ol’ American Noxzema skin care. “I find myself smelling the stuff they sell here to see if it might be the same.” Williams is movingly appreciative of the task at hand. “That my first opportunity to come to London was to be with Gone with the Wind—for that reason alone, I will never forget this experience.” Appropriately enough, she’s putting her time here to good advantage. On June 15, she’ll do a cabaret evening at the Jermyn Street Theatre and then another at the Soho Revue Bar on July 13.
Cane but Able: Her London opening marked a double triumph. Not only did Williams raise the roof in Act II, as those in attendance had been hoping at the intermission, but she was able to forego the cane she had been using up until that point—the result of an ankle injury sustained falling off some stairs. “I decided to let the cane go opening night because I was still having trouble with where to put it, so I thought, let me just limp a little bit.” Not that there’s anything less than robust to her performances or her choice of parts, which included 14 months as the feisty Sofia in The Color Purple on Broadway, in which she was followed by Chaka Khan.
Strong Women: “It’s been great to be able to originate Mammy, who’s a strong woman and not too different from Sofia,” says Williams. “There wouldn’t have been a Sofia had there not been a Mammy, and Hattie McDaniel certainly paved the way for me.” Of the role itself, Williams refers to the “emotional stretch things that Mammy has to jump into; that’s the thing, because [the show] is so episodic, as an actress, it’s hard to maintain the energy. Mammy has critical information to impart about death or sickness or hunger, things critically important to our lives, and the emotion has to come up right away.”
No Place Like Home: Williams’ London home is an apartment on High Holborn, a short walk from the theater, which has meant forsaking her husband back home and his two children, age 21 and 20, to whom she is very much a mother. “It’s extremely hard and it gets harder, I guess, as time goes on and once the work becomes less intense. It is a difficult test that we both decided to take on.” Williams quite sensibly takes the long view: “I plan to be extremely famous one day, and I’m working to that end. My husband and I have committed to just trying to make that happen.” If it is true that talent will out, then watch this space.