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There’s no telling how the civil rights movement would have progressed without the sacrifices of so many individual activists. And there’s no telling what might not have happened were it not for artists like Nina Simone, who in 1963 turned her attention from a career as a singer and pianist to that of a creator of protest songs meant to advance and call attention to the movement.
Simone went from performing innocuous pop songs and playing jazz, pop and classical piano to writing and singing scorching anthems like “Mississippi Goddam” she said were meant to cut listeners like a razor.
That she did so to her own detriment makes her story all the more compelling.
Playwright Christina Ham took up Simone’s story in the 2016 play “Nina Simone: Four Women.” The play has never been produced in Orange County – but South Coast Repertory has remedied that fact with its current production.
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