Lauren Jade Makes Her Provincetown Debut
by Steve Desroches
Lauren Jade heard it all the time. While working as a singer on the Carnival Cruise Line she sang a diverse mix of songs and in a variety of genres, but time and time again passengers would approach her and ask, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Gladys Knight?” At first, she didn’t really see the resemblance, but as time passed, she began to see what others saw. And then there were a few photos where Jade thought, “Yeah. OK. I really do look like her.” She already had a song or two from Knight’s body of work in her show, but whenever someone stopped her to remark on how she looked like the American music legend from her days with the Pips she and musical director Kevin Anthony would add another one to the repertoire. Eventually, Jade interpreted so many songs of Gladys Knight’s that Anthony pulled the band together, without Jade, and concocted a plan, which gave birth to a tribute show that Jade is bringing to the Pilgrim House.
“It was during hurricane season and the seas were rough, so we couldn’t do the show like we normally did as it was a safety hazard,” says Jade. “Kevin said to the band, ‘we need to do a Gladys Knight show, but don’t tell Lauren because she’ll say no.’ That night, everyone knew about the show but me! As we started the show he said, ‘Doesn’t she look lovely? This young lady looks like who we are about to sing tonight.’ That’s how the show got started.”
A native of Montgomery, Alabama, who now calls Charlotte, North Carolina, home, Jade grew up in a home with a deep appreciation for music of all kinds. She loved to sing from a young age. She also frequently misbehaved in church, so her mother had the idea to put her in the choir so she could develop her musical talents. Since she was positioned right behind the pastor, she had no choice but to behave. Not long after, Jade enrolled in the Theater Artist Performance School (T.A.P.S.), a theater summer program for children at Alabama State University, a historically Black university in Montgomery. There she learned “all the good stuff,” like dance, production, acting, and directing. It opened a whole new world of possibilities, developing a lifelong love for the theater and the stage as well as how to be a storyteller.
It was also around this time that she discovered Gladys Knight for herself. At age 10 or 11 she definitely knew the song “Midnight Train to Georgia,” but couldn’t necessarily identify who sang the song. But then one day in 1994 Jade was watching The Oprah Winfrey Show and, in celebration of Winfrey’s 40th birthday, the producers planned a surprise appearance by Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, and Gladys Knight. It left an impression to see these three geniuses of the craft perform and inspired exploration into their work, as well as got her to think about her own life as a singer with her first solo stage adult performance being her version of Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone.” And then she started to get paid for singing, which Jade says, with a laugh, really changed things.
She started her five years working Carnival cruises. “When I started that, it really was a snowball effect,” says Jade. “It just went on from there.”
Part of the development of her career has been this tribute concert to Knight, which she performed in Columbia, South Carolina, and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to sold-out audiences and rave reviews. As a tribute show, it is not an impersonation, with each song being Jade’s rendition of songs spanning Knight’s long career. Part of that means tapping into her theatrical background. While she knew and sang the songs for years, in further developing this show she read the lyrics to each song to fully understand what they were all about. In doing so, she found all the joy, the heartbreak, the devotion, and fun. That formed the narrative tissue to the show as she opens up the music of Knight via her own voice and viewpoint as an artist inviting audiences to connect to the material and relate it to their own lives and experiences. Finishing up her fourth season in Puerto Vallarta, Jade wanted to take this show farther afield which is when Provincetown came calling.
“I had so many performer friends in Puerto Vallarta tell me that I needed to come each year,” says Jade. “All they kept saying was, ‘You need to go to Ptown! You need to go to Ptown! You need to go to Ptown!’ But I had no idea how to get there. How do I get to Ptown? And then it all just happened and fell into place. I’m going to Ptown!”
Lauren Jade presents A Tribute to Gladys Knight at Pilgrim House, 336 Commercial St., Wednesday, June 25 through Saturday, June 28 and Tuesday, July through Thursday, July 3 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets ($40/$50/$75) are available at the box office and online at pilgrimhouseptown.com. For more information call 508.487.6424.
