LaChanze

LaChanze, born LaChanze Sapp-Gooding on December 16, 1961, in St. Augustine, Florida, is an American actress, theater producer, singer, and dancer whose Broadway career spans from 1985 to 2021. Over the course of that career she has accumulated five Tony Awards, one as a performer and four as a producer.

Her earliest professional theater work came as a tap dancer in the ensemble of Uptown... It's Hot! at the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a production that subsequently moved to Broadway in January 1986. In 1990 she originated the role of Ti Moune in the Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty musical Once on This Island, earning nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical at the 45th Tony Awards and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical. In December 1998 she joined the Broadway cast of Ragtime, the Ahrens, Flaherty, and Terrence McNally musical, replacing Audra McDonald in the role of Sarah.

In June 2000, LaChanze played Viveca in the Playwrights Horizons Off-Broadway production of The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, receiving a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Musical. In September 2002 she participated in an Actors Fund of America benefit concert of Funny Girl. In March 2005, she played Dessa Rose, a runaway slave, in the Ahrens and Flaherty musical Dessa Rose at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, for which she received an Obie Award for Distinguished Performance by an Actress.

Later in 2005, LaChanze originated the role of Celie Harris Johnson in the Broadway musical The Color Purple, a performance she sustained through November 2006. At the 60th Tony Awards she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical for that role. In 2014 she returned to Broadway in If/Then, playing the role of Kate. In 2018 she appeared in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, portraying Diva Donna/Mary Gaines, and received a Tony Award nomination at the 72nd Tony Awards for that performance. In 2019 she played the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol on Broadway. That same year, LaChanze and her daughter Celia Rose Gooding appeared simultaneously on Broadway — LaChanze in A Christmas Carol and Gooding in Jagged Little Pill — repeating a rare occurrence previously associated with Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher in 1983.

In January 2022, LaChanze starred as Wiletta Mayer in Trouble in Mind, the Alice Childress play written in 1955, and earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play at the 75th Tony Awards for that performance.

Also in 2022, LaChanze launched a producing career on Broadway. She co-produced Topdog/Underdog alongside David Stone, Rashad V. Chambers, Marc Platt, Debra Martin Chase, and the Shubert Organization, and co-produced Kimberly Akimbo with David Stone, Aaron Glick, Patrick Catullo, and James L. Nederlander. At the 76th Tony Awards on June 11, 2023, she won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Revival of a Play as a producer of those two productions, respectively. That same year she co-founded Tima Productions with Marylee Fairbanks, a former Ragtime castmate, and together they co-produced The Outsiders, which earned LaChanze a Tony Award for Best Musical at the 77th Tony Awards. She also received a nomination for Best Play at that ceremony for Jaja's African Hair Braiding. In 2024 she launched a multimedia company called LC Productions.

LaChanze published her first picture book, Little Diva, in 2010. Her personal life has included significant public moments: on September 6, 2002, she sang the National Anthem at a joint meeting of Congress held at Federal Hall National Memorial, the first such gathering in New York since 1790. On May 15, 2014, she performed "Amazing Grace" at the dedication of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in tribute to her late husband, Calvin Gooding, a securities trader who was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks while at work at Cantor Fitzgerald in Tower One of the World Trade Center. LaChanze and Gooding had married in August 1998 and had two daughters, Celia and Zaya; LaChanze was eight months pregnant with Zaya at the time of his death. She subsequently married Derek Fordjour in 2005; they finalized their divorce on March 27, 2014, in Westchester County.