Broadway-bound ‘Personality’ opens in Chicago. Lloyd Price changed pop music but do people remember his name?

In 1953, a year before Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” 19-year-old Lloyd Price sat down at the piano at the Fish ‘n’ Fry, a popular Kenner, Louisiana, sandwich joint owned by his mother, Beatrice. One of 11 kids, Price had just been dumped by a girl. Raw and in pain, he knocked out an unvarnished R&B song that turned his raw feelings into words and music.

“I’m gonna tell, tell my mama, Girl, I’m gonna tell what you doing to me, I’m gonna tell everybody, That I’m down in misery.”

The next line, and the title of the song, was “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and, over the next half-century that song, written in the segregated South and first recorded with Fats Domino playing piano, would be covered by Elvis Presley, Little Richard, The Hollies, Joe Cocker, Ike Turner, Bill Haley and His Comets, and even Paul McCartney. When Price died in 2021, the New York Times obituary credited “Lawdy” as introducing “the infectious New Orleans beat to white listeners years before the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ was in wide use.” Other Black artists had intentionally written songs for the so-called white market, but Price is widely seen as being the first to write a crossover hit without ever planning to do so.

And that’s not even the song for which Lloyd Price is most remembered. That would be “Personality,” which also happens to be the title of the new Price jukebox musical currently coming together inside a rehearsal space in the Fine Arts Building on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, readying for a June 14 opening — and then hoping to put up the name Lloyd Price on a Broadway marquee.

The song “Personality,” which Price wrote in 1959, has a clever lyrical hook successively attaching various attributes (walk, talk, smile, charm, love) to the title word. The song clearly was written as admiring a woman but it had a moniker that also became attached, along with the word “mister.” to the songwriter for the rest of his life. Still, far more people remember “Personality” than remember Price. This is despite his being a remarkable innovator in the entertainment business. He wrote songs, sang them, founded labels that recorded them, managed other artists and owned a prominent New York nightspot, located well south of Harlem at 1674 Broadway (the old Birdland), first called the Turntable Club (Turntable Records was Price’s label). It was later called the Crawdaddy Club (the Ed Sullivan Show’s band would warm up there).

Price even had his own line of Southern food, including Lloyd Price’s Soulful ‘n’ Smooth Grits.

But most biographical jukebox musicals on Broadway are about megastars: Gloria Estefan, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Carole King, Donna Summer, Johnny Cash. Price is not in that category, not least because his massively successful early career was interrupted by him going off to fight in the Korean War. He came home to find out first that music had changed while he was gone, and second that his label had replaced him with Little Richard. He kept going, but he also wisely diversified his career.

In essence, the bookwriter B. Jeffrey Madoff and his producing partners are hoping that their show, which stars Saint Aubyn, a veteran of The Temptations musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” in the elder version of the title role, is sufficiently revealing of a historic figure in 20th century music, a man who was working at the very birth of rock ‘n’ roll, that people will be curious. And the creators surely know they can deliver the songs: Aside from “Personality” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” other Price hits include “Stagger Lee” and “I’m Gonna Get Married.” Others who have covered and further popularized his material include Bruce Springsteen and Amy Winehouse.

“Lloyd Price,” Madoff said during a break from a recent rehearsal, “is an unsung hero.” As Madoff and director Sheldon Epps explain it, the main challenge with the project mostly is jogging people’s memory about their subject, or teaching younger music fans about the centrality of their man to the development of the music they love.

“What he did unfolds at the crossroads of the youth movement and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll,” Madoff says. “He was the first Black man to sell 1 million records; the first to start his own record label; the first to ferment ‘race-mixing.’ I’ve heard other people take credit for what Lloyd Price achieved.”

And when it comes to the foundational moments of rock history, that’s hardly surprising.

Madoff knows his man. In fact, Price is credited as the co-writer of the show. Madoff, best known as a screenwriter, first became interested in Price’s work creatively when Madoff was making a short documentary about his career. He decided he wasn’t done. “I thought it would make a great musical,” Madoff said.

So Madoff and Price sat in Price’s home for an extensive series of interviews prior to the first March 2022 production of “Personality” at the People’s Light Theatre, outside Philadelphia. Reviews mostly were positive, quibbling with some aspects of the busy book but also praising the show’s attempts, blessed by Price, to go beyond a hagiography, which is not always the case with this particular genre.

Price, alas, died before the show’s opening night, although he certainly knew the show was happening. He saw an early workshop presentation and sat there, Madoff said, with tears streaming down his face.

“His is not an angry story,” Madoff said. “He wasn’t bitter. There was a lot he didn’t get to do. He knew that I knew that he knew.”

Epps says commercial producers already are attached to the piece and that extensive additional work is being done for the Chicago production, essentially a mainstream pre-Broadway tryout, albeit the rare one presented locally without the involvement of Broadway in Chicago which runs most of the big theaters in downtown Chicago. The show, which is being produced in Chicago under one of the union Actor’s Equity’s local contracts, does not yet have a Broadway theater.

The Studebaker Theater, where “Personality” will premiere, is an independent operation still finding its post-pandemic feet. Indeed, many Chicago fans of new musicals will be seeing the gorgeously renovated Studebaker for the first time. Not long ago the main theater of the now-defunct Fine Arts movie operation, it is a reborn live venue with plenty to prove at this level — something that also is true of its new tenant.

The show, Epps says, mostly brings out its numbers in “performance situations,” but it also works in others at points in Price’s story. The elder version of the man is also the narrator, looking back at his younger self, played by Darian Peer. Other key characters include Emma Price (Alexandria Reese), who was married to Lloyd, and Lloyd Price’s business partner Harold Logan (Stanley Wayne Mathis), who was murdered in 1969. Choreography is from Edgar Godineaux, once a dancer with Michael Jackson and another veteran of “Ain’t Too Proud.” And the rest of the production team is made up of blue-chip Broadway names, most as respected as Epps.

The company of “Personality” is a little smaller than most Broadway musicals, although the ensemble members (a mix of New York and Chicago performers) certainly were dancing up a storm in their cramped rehearsal room.

“The women have set a high bar,” said Godineaux, turning to his male dancers as the female ensemble members completed an especially energetic dance number, designed to evoke Price’s frenetic early days in early 1950s New Orleans. “Y’all better bring it.”

“Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical” opens on June 14 at the Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; more information at personalitymusical.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com