Talbert, David E. 1966(?)–

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David E. Talbert 1966(?)–

Playwright

Failed Romance Spurred Creativity

Recruited Gospel-Music Star

Made Feature Film

Musicals Addressed Contemporary Concerns

From Urban Broadway to Broadway

Sources

David E. Talbert was a producer, writer, and director of several successful musicals that were sometimes tagged as gospel theater, but which he preferred to call “soul” plays. San Francisco Chronicle journalist Robert Hur-witt described them as “star-powered cautionary comedies laced with gospel songs and heavy sexual innuendo, wrapped in a family-values Christian moral and heavily marketed to African-American communities.” Indeed, Talbert musicals like Mr. Right Now and His Woman His Wife have brought such impressive box-office receipts that Talbert was hired to write and direct Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, a Broadway musical of the Motown Records story. Talbert noted that while his plays could be classified as gospel theater, “the word gospel means nothing but the truth,” in an interview with Lori Talley for Back Stage West. “And what’s helped me along the way is that I’ve stayed true to my voice.”

Failed Romance Spurred Creativity

Talbert, born in the mid-1960s, grew up on Kentucky Avenue S.E. in the District of Columbia. He attended a Pentecostal church in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and later studied marketing at Morgan State University. He began writing poetry while a student there after a failed romance, but turned to drama after attending a performance of the hit musical Beauty Shop. “I sat there in the theatre and had a surreal moment watching the audience,” Talbert recalled in the interview with Talley for Back Stage West. “They were having such a good ol’ time. I remember saying to myself, I bet I could give them something that was not only comedic but thought-provoking, spiritually grounded without the politically correct and over-the-top slapstick feel.”

Talbert began writing for the stage that very night, and his first play, Tellin’ It Like It Tiz, premiered at the Black Rep Theater in Berkeley, California in August of 1991. The story and its focus on relationships between a group of African-American men and women was set in a women’s clothing store and a barbershop. The play was a great success. He described it as “the farthest thing from the gospel … it was an adult play about relationships from both the male and female perspectives. There were no holds barred and we advertised it to be for mature audiences only. Needless to say, when the production finally arrived in DC, my mother said, ‘Lord Jesus, what is my baby doin ‘?’.”

Recruited Gospel-Music Star

Talbert repeated that first success with several other works for the stage, which he wrote, produced, and directed. One of his first dramas with overtly religious tones was He Say She Say … But What Does God Say? The 1996 musical drew audiences with the help of its lead, gospel star Kirk Franklin, who played the pastor of a debt-ridden True Vine Full Gospel Church. In the play Franklin battled with a local drug dealer who acquired enough real-estate to sink the church, but when the dealer was shot, he repented and gave the pastor the necessary funds to save his ministry. He Say She Say featured an audience sing-along in the second

At a Glance…

Born c. 1966, in Washington, D.C.; married to actress Lyn E. Talbert Education: Graduate of Morgan State University.

Career: Playwright, theatrical producer, and director. Urban Broadway Series, artistic director and executive producer, 2001.

Awards: NAACP Best Playwright Theater Award.

act, when Franklin’s urban preacher inquired of theatergoers, “How many of you know God’s been good to you?” The production also featured some 1970s television personalities: BernNadette Stanis, who played Thelma on the 1970s sitcom Good Times, appeared, and Ernest Thomas who played Raj on another hit show of the era, What’s Happening. Talbert’s play also became the basis for the UPN sitcom Good News in 1997.

Some of Talbert’s plays were, at times, classed with other popular dramas playing in venues in major urban centers. Washington Times writer Nelson Pressley noted that such plays were sometimes referred to as part of a contemporary “Chitlin’ Circuit” which, Press-ley wrote, could be “characterized by extremely lowbrow, loud, and often lewd musical comedies that have threadbare plots and adolescent sensibilities.” But Pressley stressed that Talbert’s “gospel-laced shows generally have a higher purpose.” In reviewing A Fool and His Money, a 1997 Talbert musical, Pressley remarked that “Talbert isn’t above letting his actors mug like circus clowns, but he throws most of his weight behind the show’s simple, preachy messages: Resist adultery; don’t deal drugs; put your faith in God, not money.”

A Fool and His Money was a characteristically comic Talbert tale with a social message. It centered upon the Jordan family and its economic travails: James Sr. lost his job, and his son James Jr. became a drug dealer employed by a local gangster who began to date the Jordan daughter, Tabitha. Then James Sr. won a contest and with it, a financial windfall. Act II showed the Jordans freely spending their new money. Moral consciousness came through the voices of Mother Jordan, matriarch of the family, and with the reappearance of a long-lost sibling, Skeeter. Meanwhile, Tabitha’s spurned boyfriend, an honest Navy man, also returned. “I create characters that mirror the everyday lives of my audiences,” he told Washington Times journalist Denise Barnes. “The audiences become vested in the outcome of the characters. And it’s the characters’ ability to work out their issues onstage. The audience works out their issues, and it becomes a communal experience.”

Made Feature Film

That same year, Talbert directed his first feature film A Woman Like That. It starred Tyra Banks and Malik Yoba and was shown at the Urbanworld Film Festival, but failed to win a distribution deal. He recruited another television actor, Welcome Back, Kottef’s Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, to play a suave romantic lead in Mr. Right Now in 1999. The plot centered on Angel, the single mother of a teenaged son, who was on solid ground professionally and financially, but longed for a “Mr. Right” with whom she could share her life. She made bad choices, ignoring the plumber she must call occasionally who harbored a crush on her, and headed toward disaster when she met Hilton-Jacobs’s character. “The moral of the story is crystal-clear, but it’s delivered with a degree of panache,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic Don Shirley.

Talbert’s plays proved a terrific commercial success for him, sometimes grossing $500,000 in one week. They were costly to stage, but were not in the same price range as a typical touring production of a Broadway show. Because of this, ticket prices were reasonable, and Talbert’s works were commended for winning over a new generation of first-time theater-goers. Though his plays were gaining more mainstream recognition, he remained a bit wary of such accolades. “We need to stop looking to other people to validate our work,” Talbert told Essence writer Ytasha L. Womack. “Every night smiling faces come out of my theater. Now that’s a Tony Award.”

Musicals Addressed Contemporary Concerns

Talbert had another hit in 2000 with His Woman His Wife, which starred Tommy Ford as an attorney, Stuart, who lived with his girlfriend, Denise, played by Stephanie Mills, the original Dorothy in the Broadway production of The Wiz, but was wary of marriage. The plot was complicated by the machinations of two other women: Denise’s mother, who wanted to see their union made legal, and Stuart’s ex-girlfriend, who hoped to win him back. “The script follows the usual rhythmic pattern, with brash sitcom exchanges evolving into preachy, feel-good moments,” noted Shirley in a Los Angeles Times review.

Talbert’s ninth stage work, The Fabric of a Man, enjoyed a 30-city tour. The story centered on the romantic travails of an increasingly successful clothing designer. Cheryl “Pepsi” Riley, a veteran of other Talbert plays, was cast in the lead; her boyfriend, played by Roc’s Clifton Powell, was an Ivy League graduate who resented her busy life and inattention to his needs. Actor Shemar Moore, best known for his heartthrob role on the daytime drama The Young & the Restless, played a third element of the romantic triangle. Again, the work was a hit with audiences in several cities.

Talbert shied away from any attempt to classify his work. “What I try to put onstage is the truth about black people’s experiences and what we are going through,” he told Barnes in the Washington Times. “I give it a comedic spin, a dramatic spin, and a spiritual resolve. All of my plays have moral messages and characters that go thorough redemptive processes.” Though his works featured rousing musical numbers and an uplifting message, he avoided marketing them as outright “gospel” musicals in the vein of Mama Don’t or Your Arms Too Short To Box With God. “I believe that anytime anyone is spending money to see your ministry, it’s entertainment,” he asserted in an interview published on the GospelCity.com website. “We have to appeal to the audience’s desires to laugh, to be touched and moved, to relate with the situation unfolding in front of them.”

From Urban Broadway to Broadway

In early 2002 Talbert launched his Urban Broadway Series with Love Makes Things Happen. The work featured songs written by record producer and hit-maker Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, and starred his brother Kevon Edmonds in the male lead as a postal clerk in love with a recently divorced computer-industry executive, played by En Vogue’s Dawn Robinson. Their friends and families all doomed the romance, noting that their income differences were simply too great to surmount. “The story winds its way through a maze of clichés, but the likable leads and often hilarious supporting cast keep it breezing along,” opined Detroit News critic Steve Jones.

Also in 2002 Talbert was working on his next musical with actor and director Robert Townsend, tentatively titled If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time. The work was planned as an updated version of the classic Christmas feel-good movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Talbert had also been chosen by legendary Motown Records founder Berry Gordy to write and direct Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, the musical version of Detroit label’s origins and phenomenal success in the 1960s. The musical was slated to appear on Broadway.

Married to actress Lyn E. Talbert, the playwright, in 2002, lived in Sherman Oaks, California. Despite his financial success, he said that the overwhelming public response at the box office was a secondary concern. “It’s when you reflect, at the end of the day, how many seeds you’ve planted and how many lives you’ve touched,” he responded when asked about his greatest joy by GospelCity.com. “Because, when it’s time to face your maker, He’s not going to ask you how many cars you have, houses you’ve purchased, tiles and carpet you’ve bought, the size of your pool, does it feature a waterfall or are the hubcaps of your car diamond-studded? I want to be able to approach those gates with my head held high and be able to say, ‘Lord, I planted seeds.’”