Over the din of garbage trucks outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, actress Beth Leavel sings sweetly into her cell phone: “Mama said there’ll be days like this, there’ll be days like this Mama said…”
“I can’t get these songs out of my head,” she says cheerfully. “I wake up humming them and doing shoop-wop-doo whadda-whaddas.” The star of the new Broadway show Baby It’s You!—and a past Tony winner for her title role in The Drowsy Chaperone—Leavel just finished rehearsal and is bolting to her car for the drive home to Harrington Park, where the North Carolina native has lived for the past 14 years. It’s a commute that echoes the one taken by Florence Greenberg, the unlikely music mogul she portrays in the 1960s-centric musical.
A discontented homemaker from Passaic, Greenberg discovered the Shirelles at her daughter’s high school, where the honey-voiced teens first sang “I Met Him on a Sunday” in 1957. She signed the girls and made them stars, kicking off her own groundbreaking career. Greenberg nurtured artists like Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers and produced such hits as “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Soldier Boy,” “Shout” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
When it came to mining talent, Greenberg’s ear was golden, even if her pipes were tin. “She couldn’t read a note of music and couldn’t carry a tune, and she became the most successful female record producer in history,” says Leavel. “I’m still discovering so many surprising things about her.”
Baby It’s You! begins previews March 26 at the Broadhurst Theatre; it is due to open April 27.