Biography
Born on 19 July 1957 in Hampton, Virginia, Criswell built a career as an actress and singer through her appearances in stage musicals of the 1980s, projecting a vocal power and presence that recalled Ethel Merman. Raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she later recalled how touring productions would reach town by bus and remain only two nights. Early on she drew inspiration from Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Garland, and, following their example, began performing while still a child. After completing high school she enrolled in the musical-theatre program at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music and subsequently relocated to New York, where she secured a featured role in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Her Broadway debut arrived with The First in 1981; she next appeared in Nine, directed by Tommy Tune and featuring a cast of twenty-one women alongside a single adult male. Additional Broadway engagements during the decade encompassed the revivals of The Three Musketeers and The Threepenny Opera, the latter retitled 3 Penny Opera. In that production Criswell portrayed Lucy, one of the principal parts in a staging led by rock singer Sting. She has performed as featured soloist with several major American symphony orchestras and participated in concert presentations of Jerome Kern’s Sitting Pretty at Carnegie Hall and George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy at Lincoln Center. The Helen Hayes Award recognized her work in Side By Side By Sondheim, and she played Grizabella—the cat who performs “Memory”—for six months in the Los Angeles mounting of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. From 1989 to 1991 Criswell recorded three London studio versions of classic Broadway scores—Anything Goes, Kiss Me, Kate, and Annie Get Your Gun—backed by a full orchestra under John McGlinn. McGlinn also led the London Sinfonietta when Criswell joined Brent Barrett for Cole Porter And The American Musical at the Royal Festival Hall. In September 1991 she brought her solo evening Doin’ What Comes Naturally to the Shaw Theatre in London, and a little more than a year later she shared the stage with John Diedrich in a West End revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Critics praised the production (“Criswell is the best Annie we have seen since Dolores Gray”), yet it closed after fewer than two months. During 1993 she took part in two contrasting British engagements: first the musical play Elegies For Angels, Punks And Raging Queens, which recounted the true stories of thirty-three people who had died of AIDS, and later the touring revue Hollywood And Broadway II alongside Bonnie Langford and Wayne Sleep. That same year she issued two stylistically divergent recordings—The Lorelei, a collection of familiar and overlooked theatre songs, and the pop-oriented Human Cry, whose single “Moment Of Weakness” illustrated her capacity for contemporary crossover work. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s she appeared in Dames At Sea at the Covent Garden Festival in 1996, The Slow Drag at the Freedom and Whitehall theatres in 1997, Of Thee I Sing with Opera North in 1998, and the Cole Porter tribute Side By Side... By Cole Porter at the Palace Theatre in 1998, where the BBC Concert Orchestra performed under John McGlinn. She also maintained an active schedule of concert and cabaret appearances, often accompanied by pianist and musical director Wayne Marshall, and contributed to several studio cast albums, among them Simon Rattle’s recording of Wonderful Town.
Albums
