Whoopi Goldberg has many titles.
Grammy-winning stand-up comedian. Oscar-winning actor. Emmy-winning talk show host. Tony-winning Broadway producer.
And that’s just her EGOT haul.
To Danielle Pinnock, Goldberg has always been a beacon, an absolute North Star.
When she first saw the TV special adapted from Goldberg’s 1984 one-woman Broadway show, she was transfixed. Growing up in New Jersey, she would travel by bus to the Port Authority in Manhattan just so she could watch the hit performance on repeat at the Lincoln Center library.
Now Pinnock is front and center in an all-star cast that revives several of Goldberg’s characters from that landmark show and beyond. The Whoopi Monologues opened July 13 at Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater inside Lincoln Center, where Pinnock started her Whoopi journey all those years ago.
“It feels like divine timing,” she says.
Pinnock is best known for her breakout TV role as Alberta Haynes, the ghost of a lounge singer from the Prohibition era in the hit comedy Ghosts, which has run for five seasons on CBS. In 2025, her performance won the NAACP Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series.
These days, Pinnock says she’s living inside her own dream.
“Whoopi Goldberg changed my life as an artist with this project,” she says, reflecting on her beginnings as a performer. “I was living in Teaneck, New Jersey, and deciding on whether I wanted to become an actor or not, doing school plays, and I just didn’t see anyone in the media that looked like me. I was a chubby girl. I used to wear these three-piece suits and bifocals. And I remember watching The Color Purple for the first time and seeing Whoopi Goldberg and I was hooked. She was so transcendent in the role of Celie. I remember watching the credits and I was like, ‘Mom, who’s Whoopi Goldberg?’”
She was 14 years old when she visited the Lincoln Center library and asked to watch everything that Goldberg had done. The 1985 HBO special Whoopi Goldberg: Direct From Broadway preserved the special magic of the comedian’s Grammy-winning show, which, along with Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, significantly propelled Goldberg’s career as she turned 30.
“I was like, ‘How can one woman do all of these different characters?’” says Pinnock, now 38. In the new production, she inhabits Jamaican Lady, a role Goldberg created decades ago.
Pinnock stars in director Whitney White’s The Whoopi Monologues with Emmy-winning Scandal star Kerry Washington, two-time Tony winner Kara Young (Purlie Victorious, Purpose), Tony winner Kecia Lewis (Hell’s Kitchen) and Emmy nominee Dominique Fishback (Swarm, Judas and the Black Messiah).
“It really does feel like a sisterhood,” Pinnock says. “To have a seat at this table is truly an honor, and it is one of the biggest moments of my career thus far.”
“The Whoopi Monologues” cast members Kecia Lewis, at center, with, from left: Dominique Fishback, Kerry Washington, Danielle Pinnock and Kara Young. Photo: Angela Marie Orellana
The Jamaican Lady and the Old Raisin
Seeing Goldberg deliver character after character in her Broadway show changed something in Pinnock.
“A lightbulb went off, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do this. This is what I can do in theater,’” she says.
The alum of Saddle River Day School studied theater at Temple University, making her off-Broadway debut at 19 at the Barrow Street Theatre. She continued her acting studies at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in England and found a mentor in actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, diving into documentary plays as well as training in improv at The Second City in Chicago. In 2016, she joined the Colman Domingo-directed play Barbecue at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, making her TV debut that year in an episode of NBC’s This Is Us. Later, she played Ms. Ingram, a teacher in the CBS sitcom Young Sheldon.
Before she became a regular on Ghosts, Pinnock conducted hundreds of interviews to create her own one-woman theater show, Body/Courage, which took on body image and diet culture.
“Whoopi is the reason those things happened,” Pinnock says. “I give her so much credit, because she was the impetus for me to start my career.”
From left: Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Kerry Washington, Whitney White, Kara Young, Danielle Pinnock and Sunny Hostin on “The View” on June 25. Photo: ABC/ Lou Rocco
In 2023, the Jersey-raised actor made her film debut in the Amazon holiday movie Candy Cane Lane, starring Eddie Murphy and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Whoopi Monologues marks her return to theater.
Pinnock has also shared hilarious character skits with her hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. She’s played a chic Parisian bed bug during an outbreak, holiday boss Mrs. Claus, and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, opposite her own red-headed husband Jack Wallace (a British dialect coach) as Prince Harry.
In The Whoopi Monologues, Pinnock brings her Caribbean heritage to Jamaican Lady, one of the characters from Goldberg’s original Broadway show. She knows a little something about Jamaican ladies and Jamaican accents, having grown up in a Jamaican American family.
For this adaptation of the character, Pinnock enters the stage with blue pixie-cut hair dancing to the 1992 reggae song “Murder She Wrote” by Chaka Demus & Pliers. Air horns follow.
“We are having a blast,” she says.
As written by Goldberg in the ’80s, Jamaican Lady finds herself in scandalous circumstances thanks to the Old Raisin, which is her nickname for a wrinkled elderly man she meets in her native Jamaica. He tells her that he needs someone to cook, clean and give him “a little nookie” at his home in the United States.
Jamaican Lady has no idea what “nookie” means, but figures she’ll work that out when she gets there. “I’ll improvise,” she says. Many hijinks ensue, and Jamaican Lady finds herself living in the Old Raisin’s manse—which looks like Tara, the plantation from Gone With the Wind—newly addicted to watching soap operas and eating Wise potato chips. “You can eat the potato chips and use the excess as makeup,” she sagely observes.
“I think the thing that is so exciting for me to play this character is, I’m first-generation Jamaican American,” Pinnock says. “This story really is a misadventure. This woman is in Jamaica in Kingston, selling trinkets, and this man comes and says ‘I want you to move to the States with me.’ I mean, it’s not only just a massive opportunity, but she’s also fearful as to what that means.”
A Dream Realized
Pinnock first met Goldberg two years ago as a guest on The View.
“It’s rare for me to get starstruck. I was, like, shaking,” she says. “I was just so taken by how kind she was, and gracious and supportive. And she really poured into me the first day that I met her. She was like ‘Keep going,’ and ‘I’m going to check out Ghosts,’ and she called my entire family to come on stage with her and take photos with her.”
When the Jamaican Lady part came up, Pinnock inquired about the role and learned it had already been cast. But when that casting fell through, the part became hers.
She recalls what Tony winner Cynthia Erivo once told her: Be grateful for the opportunity, but remember that you deserve it, too. “I’ve worked so hard in my career that this just feels right,” Pinnock says.
Her Ghosts filming schedule partially conflicts with the Lincoln Center engagement, which runs through August 30. But showrunners gave her the green light to do both. Later this month, she’ll be flying to Montreal to film four episodes of the CBS series, then flying back to play Jamaican Lady on the weekend.
Goldberg, 70, who lives in Essex County, plans to see The Whoopi Monologues on opening night. Pinnock lets out a little scream of excitement just thinking about seeing her in the audience. At the first preview of the show on July 7, the actor snuck in a cheeky “Knicks in five!” during her performance. She inserted the topical reference when Jamaican Lady was demonstrating how she bounced the Old Raisin around like a basketball to spurn his sexual advances. Pinnock was duly rewarded with raucous cheers from the New York audience.
“I can’t wait for more family members to come see it,” she says. “I just know that to feel that energy in the room, it’s gonna be unreal.”
As for her co-stars, Pinnock marvels at being billed alongside Washington, having once had a small part in her series Scandal. “I was, like, Hairdresser No. 1 in the crossover episode with her and Viola Davis” [then starring in How to Get Away With Murder].
In The Whoopi Monologues, Washington plays Surfer Girl, another of Goldberg’s characters from 1984. She masters California surfer drawl in a performance that veers from lighthearted comedy to tragedy. The audience learns the startlingly young age of a teen facing pregnancy and an increasingly dangerous situation complicated by misogyny and shame from those she trusts.
It’s yet another instance of how Goldberg’s writing holds up more than 40 years later. There’s a reason why the setting for the show, as stated in the program, is 1985 and 2005, but also “now” and “forever.”
The Whoopi Monologues is never just about the laughs, though they are plentiful, to be sure. There are moments of heaviness and crushing despair that draw gasps and cries from the audience. Subjects like abortion and suicide play out in the characters’ stories, making them seem all the more real.
Dominique Fishback plays Blonde Girl, a wide-eyed, precious 6-year-old. She pretends a shirt on her head is “long, luxurious” blond hair. Blonde Girl has told her mother that she doesn’t want to be Black anymore because nobody who looks like her is on TV.
“We have to acknowledge Whoopi Goldberg as a playwright,” Pinnock says. “There’s a reason that this woman is an EGOT. She is everything and more.”
The Whoopi Monologues runs through August 30 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center; click here for tickets. Follow Danielle Pinnock at @bodycourage on Instagram and TikTok.
