ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512300003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MICHAEL KUCHWARA ASSOCIATED PRESS
In the show-biz school of hard knocks, Melba Moore did everything in reverse order.
She started at the top - a role in the original production of ``Hair'' in the late '60s and a Tony Award for ``Purlie'' two years later. A successful recording career. Even two brief television series.
Some two decades later, she bottomed out, her marriage and career shattered. She filed for bankruptcy and went on welfare.
Now, Moore, at age 49, has started the climb back. The vehicles? A double whammy: an autobiographical one-woman show, still in development, and a role on Broadway in ``Les Miserables.''
Starting Jan. 9, she will be playing poor, put-upon Fantine, belting out ``I Dreamed a Dream'' - and then dying on stage. She also will be reworking her own solo effort, which she has tried out in various small spots around the country. Among the titles being batted around for it are ``Melba Moore - Minor to Major,'' ``To Sing,'' and, she says with a laugh, ``Waiting to Be Reawakened.''
``Survival - that's what it is about,'' Moore said the other day during an interview. ``This is about living and determining that I would not be pushed out of my own life.''
``I really love this industry,'' she says. ``It was my life and I first put it into the form of a play four or five years ago.''
The performer started with one idea: the fact that she has a musical legacy. Her mother was a singer with the Dizzy Gillespie Band. Her natural father, Teddy Hill, had his own band.
``It's a story that tells people who you are artistically and gives them a sense of why you act and sing with such fervor. It's because it is something you just have to do.''
At first, Moore didn't know what form her own show would take.
``In a concert they really don't want you to talk,'' she says. `` You just sing your last hit and boom, go on to the next song.
``The things that I have done on stage have been very successful, but they have been very few,'' Moore says.
She decided to mix standards like ``Blue Skies'' and ``Stormy Weather,'' with her own hits like ``I Got Love,'' the number that stopped ``Purlie'' every night.
And cabaret seemed the natural venue, particularly because the expenses were low - and she was broke.
It was a version of the show, done last summer in a tiny 99-seat theater in Hollywood, Fla., that was seen by Richard Jay Alexander, the man employed by producer Cameron Mackintosh to cast and direct his various productions of ``Les Miserables.''
Alexander was blown away by the intensity of Moore's voice, still strong after all those years. She says she gets that strength from her mother, whose enthusiasm for performing has never waned.
``My mother showed me this incredible fire that never went out,'' Moore says. ``You can have the greatest technical ability, but if you can't touch people's hearts, you can't make it. That has been a driving force for me.''
It kept her afloat during her stormy 15-year marriage to Charles Huggins, her former manager and father of her daughter, Charli, now 18.
Moore won't talk about their bitter breakup now. She did in the past and found herself in contempt of court for going public about the details of the messy divorce. It was the stuff of tabloid television.
When the trauma ended, she had no money, despite making considerable sums during her career, and was forced to go on welfare.
``The role of Lutie Belle in `Purlie' really was me - a scared, shy little girl,'' Moore says. ``When you don't know what confidence is, when you've never really known what it is to be sure of yourself. I was scared to death.''
Even a successful recording career hadn't help.
``If you are black, you are an R&B artist. The recording industry is a contest all the time. You have to be on top of it. You have to sell a certain amount of records all the time. It never stops.''
As her marriage and career deteriorated, she had trouble getting back into theater. Television roles were small - and scarce.
``The only place where I was able to express myself was through my singing. I had to listen to my heart.''
She started listening again when she became a born-again Christian and was baptized nine years ago. And Moore put her religion to work for her.
She has just finished a two-and-a-half-year tour of a gospel musical called ``Momma, I'm Sorry,'' where she sang gospel music for the first time - and found it a liberating and confidence-building experience.
Now she is ready for ``Les Miserables,'' which will be a three-month engagement. Then it is back to work refining her one-woman show.
``It's really all I have left. Everything else has been taken away. If I am going to start again, the place where you reinvent yourself, as it were, is the theater - and I certainly am ready.''
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Melba Moore returns to the entertainment scene withby CNBan autobiographical show and a role on Broadway.