She Sings From Experience

Ask Carol Woods about the photos of her grandchildren on the table in her dressing room at the Ahmanson Theatre, and she’ll proudly discuss the family--even though full disclosure involves some tangled arithmetic. “I have a daughter who’s 40 years old and a son who’s 30, which makes me 39 and still holding.” She laughs, then booms: “I dispute anyone who tells me different!”

Nobody’s likely to argue with Woods or, for that matter, with her crowd-pleasing “Full Monty” character, Jeanette Burmeister. As the seen-it-all, done-it-all, stuck-in-Buffalo, eight-times-divorced pianist who accompanies six hapless male strippers in “The Full Monty” (running through June 8 at the Ahmanson Theatre), Woods fires off one-line zingers with panache.

Her signature tune, “Jeanette’s Show Biz Number,” recounts hard times and seedy gigs. Woods can relate. She remembers belting out three sets a night for $25 at New York steak joints back when she used to work the now-vanished East Coast Chitlin’ Circuit.

“Yeah, I have lived a life--some of it is very painful,” Woods says. “I had a battle with drugs, for a minute. I saw it was not for me, and I got out. I had a marriage for five years and then got divorced and struggled by myself with a child to raise. But I persevered, got my money together, tried to keep myself pulled up and, through all that living, it made me a better person and a better entertainer. I can sing the song because I know what it’s about.”

Woods caps each “Number” with a soulful lick that sounds as if it came straight out of church, so it’s not surprising to learn that she started singing gospel at age 3.

“I remember they used to stand me on a table so people could see me,” Woods recalls. Her grandfather was bishop of the Friendly Church of the Apostolic Faith in Queens, N.Y. Secular music was frowned upon as the “devil’s music,” and Woods never told her grandfather, who died at 99, that she had become a professional entertainer. “I was very respectful of him and I didn’t want to hurt him, because I knew how he felt about that sort of thing,” she explains. “He was very strict.”

Woods’ vocal gifts may have been obvious early on, but the intimate authority she now brings to the stage took years to develop. “I had an instrument, I will say, but there’s a difference between knowing how to sing and being able to sing. I used to go and watch people like Irene Reed and Ella Fitzgerald, and I’d say, ‘Gosh, I wish I could do that,’ because they’d perform with such ease and such experience. To be able to stand in front of the people and to make them feel like you are in their living room, that’s something you don’t learn overnight.

“You have to go through the fire in order to be pure,” she continues. “You have to be compressed like a piece of coal in order to become a diamond, you know. And so that’s what the years bring to a person who starts out with an ability to sing--it makes you an artist.”

Married at 17, Woods had her first child two years later, in 1963, and began working as a nurse. “I was making $67 a week, which was not a lot of money for the responsibilities I had,” says Woods, who later found a better-paying job at the post office. A friend cajoled her into singing at a postal employees’ dance, where she was spotted by an agent. Woods began moonlighting on weekends, stretching her repertoire into a full evening of entertainment by improvising variations on “Sunny,” “Summertime” and “Stormy Monday Blues”--the only three secular songs she knew at the time.

At 35, Woods landed her first Equity production as understudy for Cissy Houston in the 1979 revue “Taking My Turn.” The show’s musical director, Barry Levitt, who now runs the Lyrics and Lyricists Program at the 92nd Street Y in New York, says, “Carol brought an energy and vibrancy that was just incredible, and she continues to do that with every role she touches. Audiences trust her. When she gets out there and starts singing, she leaves you with no doubt; you believe her, and that’s a rare quality.”

Broadway shows followed, including “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” and the Tommy Tune-directed “Steppin’ Out.” Woods appeared in “One Mo’ Time,” “Taking My Turn” and “First Lady Suite” off-Broadway. She starred in “Blues in the Night” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Royal National Theatre in London, where she met her second (now former) husband. For three years, Woods toured as Momma Morton in the Kander-Ebb musical “Chicago.” Last year, in a complete departure, she portrayed Stella Deems in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.”

“I didn’t want to be typecast,” says Woods, who won over the famed composer-lyricist with her rendition of “Hey There” from “The Pajama Game.” “You cannot buy a session of six weeks with Stephen Sondheim. Everything I’ve done in this business has been ‘earn while you learn,’ and God knows, the experience I attained just being in his presence opened up my scope and taught me so much. What I was just talking about as a singer, Stephen Sondheim has that as a musician and a composer and a lyricist--he has lived a life.”

Last winter Woods auditioned for the Jeanette Burmeister role, which had earned the late Kathleen Freeman a Tony nomination for the part she originated at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

“Carol did a slam-dunk audition. I just fell over, she was so funny and so dry and so grounded,” says “Full Monty” director Jack O’Brien, speaking from Seattle, where he’s overseeing the new musical “Hairspray.” “Carol has paid her own dues as a musician, so she just got what the character was about. And when we went into rehearsals, she’d go anywhere, do anything. I told her, ‘I think your hair should be in hot rollers all evening long until the end.’ She had a couple of prescription vials in her purse, and she immediately started to wind her hair around them. She was just so playful!”

Her “Monty” moments are memorable but relatively few, and for most of the first act Woods cools her heels backstage. Is she busy getting into character? “Oh, please, gimme a break!” Woods says, giggling. “I wouldn’t call myself a theater person. I’m an all-around person because this is a job. I belong to the union. It’s a way to make a living. I enjoy my job, but I have no illusions that it will take me anywhere except to the bank. And after you take care of that, you get to the real challenge, which is life.”

And while Woods savors her zippy supporting role in “Monty,” she would have no problem taking on bigger parts. “I held myself back when I was younger because I was afraid I was gonna get swallowed up [by show business]--and I would have. But I’ve come to a point in my life where I know who I am. You don’t need a thousand numbers, that’s true, but I could appreciate a couple more songs. I’m ready now. I know my time is coming.”

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“The Full Monty” at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. (June 2, 2 p.m. only; also 2 p.m. on May 30, June 6, 2 p.m. Ends June 8. $25-$75. (213) 628-2772.