Pittsburgh-born actress Tamara Tunie has a full plate these days.
Over Mother’s Day weekend, she debuted “Jazzland In Concert” at the Harlem School of the Arts in New York.
“Jazzland” is a new musical inspired by the Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” set in depression-era Harlem at the Harlem Renaissance. It was co-written by Tunie, Charles Leipart and Scott Crockett.
“Several years ago, Charles Leipart, who I’d worked with before, he actually emailed me an animated drawing of a little Black girl in Harlem named Alice,” recalled Tunie, who directed the production. “He said, ‘What do you think about an animated musical inspired by ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that takes place in Harlem during the jazz age?’ We talked about how when we were kids we learned most of our classical and jazz music through cartoons like Looney Tunes and we thought this would be a great way to introduce young people to jazz which is getting more and more distant from the American culture and especially the African American culture and I thought it was a great idea.”
In an exclusive interview with the New Pittsburgh Courier, Tunie said the group started writing a story for the feature. Tunie spoke to a friend about doing the music and then they began shopping it around as an animated feature. That was seven or eight years ago.
While they were in search of financing for that project—they pitched it, performed a demo, and did an animated trailer. Each time they would share the trailer and the demo music, people would ask if it was a Broadway musical.
Last summer, Tunie’s partners approached her and proposed making “Jazzland” a theater piece. But with students as actors and her work with an organization that has an educational program geared toward young people, she thought it was the perfect fit for the piece and Tunie knew the perfect place: the Harlem School of the Arts.
“That has been my neighbor in Harlem for over 20 years, and I’ve been supporting the organization in various ways,” Tunie said. “I reached out to the president of the school and I told him the idea, and I sent him the music and a synopsis of the show and asked him how he would feel about doing it there.”
The end result was a Tunie-directed concert presented by the Harlem School of the Arts’ Theater Department in partnership with the Manhattan School of Music and Harlem Stage. The student members of Harlem School of Arts provided much of the cast with choreography by the Harlem School of Arts Dance and Junior Ensemble.
“What inspired me most was the children and their willingness to do the show. It’s been great and exhausting, but we were able to get it together, it was wonderful. They did a fantastic job,” Tunie gushed. “The story goes beyond ‘Alice in Wonderland;’ it’s about a young girl coming of age and finding herself and finding her place in the community during this magical, musical journey.”
“Jazzland” ran at the Harlem School of the Arts from May 11-20. Tunie will appear in the AMC Series “Dietland” in June, which will also star Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash. The dark comedy focuses on a ghost writer for the editor of a New York fashion magazine who struggles with self-image and sets out on a twisty road to self-revelation.
“Dietland is a coming-of-age revenge story that looks at the beauty industry and how we as a society see what’s beautiful and what’s not beautiful and the treatment of women. It’s sometimes funny and it’s sometimes scary,” Tunie said.
Tunie said her blue-collar upbringing in Homestead helped form her work ethic. She started her acting career after earning her BA in musical theater from Carnegie Mellon University.
“I loved growing up there. I love me some Pittsburgh. Growing up in Pittsburgh in a blue-collar town where people work really hard with a strong sense of community, that was definitely instilled in me and I definitely carry that forward,” she said.
Her breakout role as attorney Jessica Griffin in “As the World Turns” introduced her talent to an international audience. Tunie joined the cast in 1986 and left in 1995, but returned in 2000. Her last episode aired in 2007.
She didn’t know when she took the role of Jessica that she would be blazing a trail. Her interracial romance and subsequent marriage to Duncan McKechnie (played by actor Michael Swan) catapulted her popularity to new heights.
“When I joined the soap, that wasn’t even in the picture—that evolved later. They did the interracial love story in a way that wasn’t sensationalized. The way they approached the story wasn’t like the KKK or crosses on their lawns. They were insidious in dealing with the characters and the families of these people and their own thoughts on racism and I thought that was so much more powerful.”
Tunie saw her years on the soap as informative.
“My time on the soap was really great training. After I graduated from Carnegie Mellon I hadn’t done a lot of camera work and being on the soap really gave me the opportunity to figure out how to work in front of a camera. It exposed me to how to tell a story in front of a camera. It was a great foundation for me. The cool thing about being on that soap was that I was still working in the theater, I started doing more TV and film roles while I was still working on the soap.”
Tunie portrayed medical examiner Melinda Warner in the NBC drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” from 2000 to 2007 and again briefly in 2009-10. She returned for one episode of the show this year. Her other acting credits include: Margaret Thomason in the movie “Flight” opposite Denzel Washington; Lillian Fancy in “NYPD Blue;” “New York Undercover;” “Swift Justice” and “Sex in the City.”
Later this year she will be seen in “Black Earth Rising” opposite John Goodman and Michaela Coel. The Netflix and BBC drama focuses on Kate Ashby, who is rescued as a young child during the Rwandan genocide and adopted by a world-class British prosecutor in international law.
“‘Black Earth Rising’ is a political thriller that I shot in London and Ghana and it’s looking at things 20 years after the genocide…and what would it take to be fully reconciled as a country and what happens there,” said Tunie.
“In the story there are factions who believe the history must be addressed and there are others who feel we’ve moved on from that and we shouldn’t talk about it. The stakes are very high. The show is about truth. Both stories are very important and the characters are very different for me. I hope my fans enjoy it.”
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