Deborah Cox, shown performing at the Los Angeles Pride Festival in West Hollywood, is headed for Broadway to play Paris music hall star Josephine Baker. (Angela Weiss/Getty Images)
Tuesday, September 8, 2009: Canadian R&B singer and actress Deborah Cox will play the lead role in a new Broadway-bound musical about Paris music hall star Josephine Baker.
Joey McKneely, choreographer of this year's West Side Story Broadway production, will direct the musical about Baker, an exotic American expatriate and entertainer who became a star in France in the late 1930s.
Video producer and actor Steve Dorff will write the score and longtime lyricist John Bettis will write the lyrics.
Ellen Weston and Mark Hampton will also write the show, producers told the New York Times on Tuesday.
All other details about casting and the location where the musical will be staged have yet be announced.
Cox's last Broadway appearance in 2004 was as the Nubian princess Aida, in a musical by the same name, produced by Elton John and Tim Rice, that was loosely based on the Verdi opera.
Baker was a celebrated singer and dancer known to the French as La Baker, and as the Créole Goddess to anglophones. She was a world-renowned entertainer and one of the first African-American women to be featured in films, such as Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934), Princess Tam-Tam (1935) and Moulin Rouge (1941).
She is also remembered for her contributions to the civil rights movement, and for her assistance in the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation in France.
Tours with Foster this fall
Cox was born in Toronto to parents of Afro-Guyanese descent, and sang from a young age in nightclubs. By the early-1990s she had entered the mainstream music industry and was performing as a backup singer for Céline Dion.
In 1994, she moved to Los Angeles with Lascelles Stephens, her producer, songwriter, partner and future husband.
Cox is best known for her hit R&B and dance singles, Nobody's Supposed to Be Here (1998), We Can't Be Friends (1999), Absolutely Not (2001), Easy as Life (2004), Nobody Cares (2005) and Beautiful U R (2008).
Her albums include One Wish (1998), The Morning After (2002), Ultimate Deborah Cox (2004), Destination Moon (2007), and her latest, The Promise, which came out in 2008 on her own newly founded independent label, Deco Recording Group.
On film, Cox played the role of Niko Rosen in Love Come Down (2000), and Sharon in Blood of a Champion (2005).
This summer, Cox toured the U.S. with American R&B singer Kenny Lattimore, and she is preparing to tour this fall with Victoria-born producer and musician David Foster.
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