I Am Telling You: Dreamgirls at 20

In an essay for RogerEbert.com’s Black Writers Week, Odie Henderson revisits Dreamgirls on the 20th anniversary of Bill Condon’s film adaptation and the 45th anniversary of the original Broadway production. The film, starring Beyoncé, Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx, and Jennifer Hudson, opened on Christmas Day in 2006, while the Broadway musical premiered on December 20, 1981. Henderson places Dreamgirls within a larger history of Black musicals that brought Black performers, stories, and audiences to Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s. The essay moves through Henderson’s personal memories of seeing the original Broadway production in 1982 and the movie version on its opening weekend. Rather than offering a simple anniversary tribute, he focuses on how And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going became a cultural event of its own. On stage, Jennifer Holliday’s performance as Effie White generated such overwhelming audience response that the theater seemed to shake. In the film, Jennifer Hudson transformed the same song into the defining moment of her screen debut, a performance that later won her the Academy Award. Henderson also reflects on Dreamgirls as part of a lineage that includes The Wiz and Ain’t Misbehavin’, musicals that made Black presence central to Broadway’s popular imagination. For him, the lasting power of Dreamgirls lies not only in its songs or its screen adaptation, but in the collective experience it created for audiences. Through Effie White’s voice, the musical becomes a story about ambition, exclusion, comeback, and the force of a performance that continues to echo decades later.

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