Bold & Brassy Blues

American Conservatory Theater, by arrangement with Arthur Shafman International, Ltd., presents acclaimed blues and jazz singer Sandra Reaves-Phillips’s internationally lauded tour-de-force Bold & Brassy Blues. The program includes a wide variety of blues classics, ranging from the boisterous to the profoundly emotional.

Having performed Bold & Brassy Blues to great acclaim throughout Europe and the United States, Reaves-Phillips has taken to calling the show an “autobiofusical,” a fusion of Reaves-Phillips’s life story with powerful renditions of the blues classics that have most influenced her. Due to her own difficult upbringing, Reaves-Phillips identified from a very early age with the blues artists whose work she adored. Born out of rape, she never knew her father, and grew up in a desolate tin-roof shack without a bathroom. Later in life she moved from town to town, trying to scrape together a means of getting by. At one point, Reaves-Phillips set up a trade selling meals out of her suitcase, but she never once lost sight of her dream of a career in the performing arts.