Chisholm for President! has some of the raw ingredients capable of taking it to London’s West End in a future life. This embryonic production – performed as a one-off, staged concert in the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall – dramatises the career of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and powers its narrative with a 1970s-inspired score penned by MC, lyricist, and poet Testament.
The concert evoked the recent West End production Sylvia, which used idioms of funk and soul to narrate the history of Britain’s suffragette movement and the activism of Sylvia Pankhurst. Like Sylvia, Chisholm for President! highlights a woman on the fringes of politics who received belated recognition for her progressive ideals.
Madeline Appiah (Tina) fronts the production playing Chisholm and does so with authority, capturing the Bajan cadences of Chisholm’s speech. After struggling to be heard in Congress, Chisholm decides to run for leadership of the Democratic Party and thus the presidency, campaigning on a left-wing platform of racial and gender equality, social welfare, and pulling troops out of Vietnam. Working with significantly fewer resources and financing than her competitors, Chisholm has to navigate the exhausting campaign trail, facing abhorrent racism as well as opposition from within her own community.
Testament’s score nods to the funk, soul, and jazz of the era. The titular song is rousing in its interweaving of Chisholm’s most memorable speeches and soundbites against a stirring, soulful arrangement propelled by ensemble backing vocals. It captures the magic of both Hamilton and Sylvia‘s standout moments. The shameful machinations and internecine manoeuvring of Washington are also summarised in the witty ‘Politricks’. Michelle Obama, played by Rachel Modest, makes an unexpected cameo, imparting her advice that ‘when they go low, we go high‘ in a hair-raising gospel number. Does it make dramatic sense that Chisholm is being given advice by someone who emerged several generations later and who was in fact inspired by Chisholm? Not really, but Modest brings the house down.
This is still clearly a work-in-progress. Zodwa Nyoni‘s book falters on its expository framing and for downplaying the grittiness of the period in favour of sentimental (and at times unsubstantiated) conclusions about Chisholm’s impact. By beginning the narrative with Chisholm already elected as a congresswoman, there is little exploration of her earlier years and formative political influences. The score also has its fallow moments which neither progress the narrative nor allow Appiah to reach her full acting and vocal potential. But there is something special here that needs to be honed and developed. We’ll see what the future has in store for Chisholm for President!
