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Jennifer Hudson and Jenifer Lewis Turn ‘Dreamgirls’ Into an Effie White Meeting of the Voices
Jennifer Hudson and Jenifer Lewis sing 'I Am Changing' on Hudson’s show, linking two generations of Effie White.
Jennifer Hudson and Jenifer Lewis are both tied to one of musical theater’s most durable role reversals: Effie White, the singer whose pain and power helped make Dreamgirls an enduring touchstone. On the Tuesday, May 12 episode of Hudson’s talk show, that shared history becomes the point, as Billboard exclusively previews a duet that leans all the way into the idea of one Effie meeting another.
In the clip from The Jennifer Hudson Show, Hudson introduces Lewis and starts to revisit the pair’s earlier singalong, but Lewis quickly takes the conversation back to the stage history that connects them. She explains that after college, when she moved to New York, she replaced Tony Award-winner Jennifer Holliday in the workshop production of Dreamgirls before the show eventually made it to Broadway.
“I’m telling y’all right now, I could sing my ‘a’ off back then,” Lewis says. “But nobody could sing like Jennifer Holliday. Of course, she took it to Broadway.”
Lewis then draws the lineage even more bluntly: “It was Jenifer Lewis that developed the role of Effie. Jennifer Holliday took it Broadway. And Jennifer Hudson did the movie. That’s a lot of ‘Jennifer’ going on.” It is a neat bit of self-mythologizing, but also a reminder of how Dreamgirls has been carried across generations by performers who each stamped Effie White differently.
From there, Lewis tells Hudson, who won an Oscar for playing Effie White in the 2006 film adaptation, that they are going to sing together and that she already knows which song should happen. Unsurprisingly, she chooses a Dreamgirls standard: “I Am Changing.”
“I want y’all to know, and this is true, I haven’t sung this song since I was 19 years old,” says Lewis, now 69, as the opening notes begin. What follows is less a novelty than a performance with real lineage attached to it, as Lewis and Hudson trade lines, then rise from their seats and hold onto one another while the duet builds toward its finish. They close with a hug and a round of “I love you.”
Hudson, still visibly thrilled by the exchange, turns to the audience afterward and sums it up simply: “I got to sing with Jenifer Lewis, yo! I’m living a dream right now.”
