Able in Paris: One-woman show tells how Josephine Baker found herself as a French heroine

Tymisha Harris as Josephine

The search for personal identity in a weltering world can sometimes seem like a core 21st-century problem. Among the many ways that search has been carried out earlier in the history of prominent people that of Josephine Baker, an expatriate entertainer known and loved by the French public from the 1920s until her death in 1975. Hers is an extraordinary example of what it means to invent, and re-invent, oneself.

As the District Theatre show "Josephine" indicates, as a black girl in St. Louis during the racially explosive 'teens, she entered show business in the most vulnerable condition imaginable. She was a prime target for exploitation and a rough education in the school of hard knocks. In two scintillating acts, Tymisha Harris outlines a portrait that draws on Josephine's nascent charisma and her somewhat slower-to-develop skills. 

Harris designed the costumes and choreographed the show. An earlier version played Indianapolis at the 2016 Fringe Festival, District Theatre director Pauline Moffat told me at intermission Friday night. "Josephine" has evolved with the collaborative efforts of Harris and Michael Marinaccio, whose multifaceted work is summed up in the program as "producer/director/co-creator."

The production's weight perhaps disproportionately rests on the first act, where Baker's multiple transformations and life changes are concentrated. But the audience sails through the more poised and restrained second on vivid memories of the first.  

Alexander Calder wire sculpture of Josephine Baker (1926).
The hands remind me of how Tymisha Harris uses hers in "Josephine"

Admiration takes over, and surprisingly reaches a summit in Harris' reverent singing of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin',"  which puts an imaginative musical cap on Josephine's appearance (speaking, not singing) onstage at the March on Washington in 1963, just before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech.

Harris' impersonation of a truly legendary figure has warmth and substance throughout. An approximation of the nude dancing that brought the young woman favorable notoriety in 1920s Paris has the unashamed energy and pizzazz of an entertainer embracing her destiny and happy to fulfill it without reservation. A blithe narrative of Baker's personal relationships — both stormy and fulfilling, charitable as well as erotically charged —is woven into her representation of Josephine's dancing and singing.

Her love of exotic pets, her service to the French Resistance in World War II, and her adoption of a "Rainbow Tribe" of a dozen children are all recounted in Harris' quest to offer a complete portrait of a unique woman, who turned her appeal as a suggestive symbol of black beauty into an outsize personality she seems to have controlled well both on- and offstage. 

As with that Dylan song, the show's other musical numbers take their place appropriately, shedding light on the heroine's life at different stages. Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" is a vehicle for combining Baker's early awkwardness with her indelible magnetism. "Strange Fruit" is intoned hymnlike, with a perspective and pathos equal to Billie Holiday's, made more monumental by Baker's triumphant return to her homeland amid her painful memories of racism. "La Vie en Rose" takes a commanding position at the end, cementing Baker's luster as an icon of French popular culture, while inevitably carrying her American background into an arena where she could put it to good use.

"Josephine" is a welcome reminder of the strength that can emerge from the search for an identity  grounded in authenticity.  But it's also solid, fully engaging entertainment. You may get to hold one of Josephine's tomatoes. (Proper context for that requires you to see the show.)

[Photo of Tymisha Harris in performance by Dan Axler]