PLAYBILL.COM'S CUE & A: Tonya Pinkins By : Ernio Hernandez 02 May 2007 Tonya Pinkins - currently starring on Broadway in - fills out Playbill.com's questionnaire with random facts, backstage trivia and pop culture tidbits.

The Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change began previews on the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage Oct. 11. The musical will officially open Oct. 19.

George. C Wolfe’s production stars Tonya Pinkins, who created the role in the original Off-Broadway production, which divided the critics, but went on to receive six Tony nominations, winning Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Anika Noni Rose.

With book and lyrics by the Tony and Pulitzer-winning Kushner (Angels in America, Homebody Kabul) and music by Tony Award winner Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie), Caroline, or Change is set in Louisiana 1963 and follows the friendship between a black maid and the Jewish son of her employers.

IT’S an odd title that Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, and the composer Jeanin Tesori have given their musical. Caroline Thibodeaux is the black maid who irons and irons day after day, year after year, in the basement of a liberal Jewish family’s house in Louisiana.

But why: "Or Change"? Maybe because it is 1963, year of the rise of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement - and it’s come in time for Caroline’s children but not for Tonya Pinkins’s doggedly enduring, implacably unchanging, Caroline herself.

Fourteen years ago, actress Tonya Pinkins surpassed even her loftiest dreams. She won a Tony Award in 1992 for her Broadway performance in Jelly's Last Jam. She was in top physical shape. She was married to the love of her life and had beautiful children.