‘There’s not a lot of Black stories made by Black creatives in theater’: inside Kwame Kwei-Armah’s new TLC musical
CrazySexyCool, an ambitious new musical about the visionary 90s trio TLC at Arena Stage in Washington DC, aspires to make good on its title and then some. Crammed with platinum sing-alongs and tabloid-chronicled plot twists, it follows the legendary girl group – Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas and Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins – through more than a decade of success and struggle, resulting in a teeming production that includes piles of era-defining R&B hits, deep racks of vintage Cross Colours T-shirts and a claw-foot bathtub filled with Nikes set aflame. At its most outrageous, CrazySexyCool seems to be testing the tensile strength of the jukebox musical itself.
Then again, this is TLC. The truth was outrageous. And that makes for a busy, dizzying, detail-minded show. Throughout the various dramas unfolding onstage, the musical’s three leads – Holli’ Gabrielle Conway at T-Boz, Jade Milan as Left Eye, Stoney B Woods as Chilli – exude a poise that feels as cool and congenial as the real TLC did when they ruled the radio three decades ago. At a weeknight performance of CrazySexyCool in late June, audience members seemed as if they’d been reunited with old friends, singing, laughing, shouting affirmations and dancing in their seats.
The songs sound bright and big-hearted – Waterfalls, No Scrubs, Creep – but their playfulness feels hard-earned when set against the trio’s individual and collective battles with illness and alcoholism, the callousness of the music industry and, of course, Lopes’s tragic death in a car accident in 2002. Yet, in the eye of the media hurricane that surrounded TLC during the group’s starriest years, CrazySexyCool writer-director Kwame Kwei-Armah says he saw a story of loyalty and camaraderie. “What I’ve attempted to write is how these three humans – before and after Left Eye’s death – needed each other in order to be the best that they could possibly be,” Kwei-Armah says on a phone call. “How do you survive something? How do you get by when something so catastrophic happens, when you lose someone that is so instrumental to who you are?”
Sinking deeper into those questions, Kwei-Armah turned his ears to TLC’s What About Your Friends?, a relatively modest hit from 1992 with a refrain that asks: “What about your friends? Will they stand their ground? Will they let you down again?” Kwei-Armah wanted to expound on those ideas. “How does friendship shape your life?” he asks. “Who are you with and without it?”
His friendship tale unspools chronologically, starting with Chilli auditioning for the group with gusto, positing herself as an ally against any music-biz villains who might try to dim TLC’s bright aesthetic vision. From there, the villains change shape. As the trio’s fame grows, T-Boz struggles with sickle cell anemia and later, cancer. Left Eye burns up her boyfriend’s sneaker collection – and with it, whoops, his mansion – then retreats to Central America to detox. With the plot moving at the speed of life, the group’s friendships tighten through the musical numbers. They grow closer by dancing in lockstep (Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg) and harmonizing in song (Perfect Girls).
Kwei-Armah is the former artistic director of London’s Young Vic theater and the creative force behind 2018’s carnival-inspired reinvention of Twelfth Night and 2023 drama Beneatha’s Place. He was able to read an early draft of the script out loud to TLC’s Thomas for feedback. “I’m reading someone’s life to them: my interpretation of their life,” Kwei-Armah says of the experience. “I didn’t realize how scared I was until we ended, and she cried, and she hugged me really hard. I think I slept for two days after that.” But when he awoke, he still needed the nod from TLC’s other surviving member. When he presented the script to Watkins, “She went: ‘That’s a great way to start,’” Kwei-Armah says with a laugh. He continued to make revisions with the duo’s input.
Ultimately, CrazySexyCool is accountable to the audience’s memory – a fact that isn’t lost on choreographer Chloe O Davis, who, like so many of her generation, grew up memorizing TLC’s signature moves while gazing into the glow of MTV. Under Davis’s guidance, Conway, Milan and Woods embody their respective characters down to the last muscle group. Notice the way T-Boz flicks her nose, the way Left Eye shrugs her shoulders, the way Chilli does “those Chilli knees,” Davis says, describing the anti-gravitational wobbles immortalized in the Creep video. “The nuances that you see on stage also come from those actresses really finding time to understand each other, to get to know each other, to appreciate each other.”
If that level of nuance feels significant, it’s because this kind of production is rare. “There’s not a lot of Black stories made by Black creatives in the theater,” Davis says. “I felt honored to have hands on it, to make it feel as authentic as possible.”
That intersection of intimacy and authenticity is probably what makes CrazySexyCool feel most true to the spirit of TLC. In reality, these women made pop masterpieces, but always with the effortlessness of friends having fun together. And in making these characters feel like friends onstage, CrazySexyCool makes them feel like friends to us all. Even for a story this scrupulously told, Kwei-Armah knows that the facts are second to that feeling. “If people want to go to Wikipedia, they can, right?” Kwei-Armah says. “Our job is to humanize it.”
