Eric Anderson “Soul Doctor” (Carol Rosegg)
Amber Iman rejoices outside New World Stages, where she slept on a cot while playing in “Rent.” Inset, as Nina Simone in “Soul Doctor,” with Eric Anderson’s Shlomo Carlebach. (NY Post: Brian Zak, Carol Rosegg (inset))
There are many ways to get to Broadway. For Amber Iman, who’s making her debut tonight in “Soul Doctor,” it took a kick in the butt from her boyfriend back in Atlanta.
“He said, ‘If you don’t leave for New York, I will break up with you because I don’t want you to resent me and have any regrets in your life,’ ” she recalls.
So she left — and many friends’ couches, bank overdrafts and a spot of homelessness later, she arrived, landing the role she seems born to play: Nina Simone, the smoky-voiced jazz singer who made an unlikely muse — and a most unorthodox lover — to Shlomo Carlebach, the singing rabbi at the heart of “Soul Doctor.”
Although the musical takes liberties with the details, the two were “emotionally” connected, says the rabbi’s daughter, Neshama Carlebach, who believes the two also had a brief physical relationship in the ’50s.
“I can’t remember exactly how they met, but he loved her very much,” says Neshama, who was 20 years old when her father died, in 1994. (Simone died 10 years ago, in France; her daughter, Lisa Celeste Stroud, couldn’t be reached for comment.)
Neshama says her father embraced all kinds of music, even performing with Bob Dylan at the Village Gate: “I heard a recording where he says, ‘Brother Bob, it’s my dream to hug everyone in the world.’ And Bob said, ‘Shlomo, that’s my biggest nightmare.’ And then they sang ‘Kumbaya’ together.”
But back to Iman. The daughter of an actress, she studied musical theater at Howard University. She saw what happened to those a year ahead of her, who went to NYC with stars in their eyes: “They ended up working at Starbucks!”
So, after graduation, Iman returned to Atlanta, living with her folks while performing in local theaters. Before she knew it, she’d fallen in love with a jazz drummer, Henry Conerway III. Life was good. Her Broadway dreams faded.
That’s when he told her to get going.
“The funny thing is, he left first,” she recalls, giggling. “He had a cruise-ship gig. So I thought, ‘Now I really have to go!’ ”
Iman and her mom loaded their Jeep with winter clothes and drove 14 hours to Harlem. It was January 2012, and she had no job — just a roommate who was “not a nice person.” Iman found out there was an opening in “Rent” and decided to audition. Rather than risk her roomate’s wrath by waking him, she says, she warmed up for the audition one 28-degree morning singing “Seasons of Love” while sitting in a park, swathed in blankets.
The casting people put Iman on hold, and the roommate told her to leave. Luckily, she got a gig singing backup for Lauryn Hill. She stowed her stuff in a storage locker in The Bronx and left for Hill’s European tour.
Three months later, she came back. She had no job, no apartment — just friends who let her camp out on their couches. She held her breath every time she swiped her debit card, praying it wouldn’t be declined.
One day, before auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” Iman lost both her MetroCard and the key to her storage locker, where she kept her music. She couldn’t afford the $135 the locksmith wanted to open it, so she went to Staples, printed out a copy of her audition song (“He’s No Good,” from “The Life”) and stuck it into a 99-cent notebook. (“You probably shouldn’t go to an audition with just one song in a really cheap notebook,” her agent told her.)
“Mormon” passed, but the people at “Rent” wanted to see her again. Iman managed to sing “Seasons of Love” before she stumbled to the street and threw up.
She got the job. She also found out she had a stomach ulcer — and still no apartment. The friend she’d been staying with left town, and the sublet she found wouldn’t be hers for five days.
So she stayed at the New World Stages theater, where “Rent” was playing, sleeping on a cot in the women’s dressing room, using the shower there and hanging out in the lobby. “I was safe, I wasn’t cold,” says Iman, now 27. “Hey, you do what you have to do.”
About a year and several jobs later, she auditioned for “Soul Doctor.” Hours after she won the part of Nina Simone’s understudy, the star dropped out and suddenly Iman was Simone.
And her boyfriend back in Atlanta?
“He’s coming to our opening tonight!”