Loretta Devine delivers speech at Sheryl Lee Ralph's Walk of Fame ceremony
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00:00I'm Loretta Devine and I'm here. Cheryl invited me to talk about her in the Dream Girl years, which was the years before. So that's what I'm going to talk about. And then Quinto is going to take us to the present.
00:16Yes. Back in 1979, Cheryl and I auditioned for Project 9 that was going to be happening at Joseph Papp's Theater. It went on and it was called Project 9. It went on for six weeks. We loved the music and then everything stopped.
00:35We, Cheryl and I, decided we definitely loved this project. So many other jobs came up and quite often we said no, hoping that it would happen again.
00:45Tom Iron and Henry Krieger got together and presented it to Michael Bennett, who accepted the project. And it went from Project 9 to One Night Only to Big Dreams and finally to Dream Girls.
01:03It was four six-week workshops that got us prepared for Boston, the tryouts. And Boston was extreme. We had no idea what eight shows a week felt like.
01:21We loved the music, but we didn't know how much we had to love the music to make it work.
01:26And Cheryl and I were roommates on Broadway, 1981, for four years.
01:37Woo!
01:41We only had two big fights in four years. Come on!
01:46The first one was because I kept getting hit in the head by a flat because Cheryl Lee, I thought, wasn't moving out fast enough.
01:55We were in the line and she had to go and she wasn't going. And I was like, she's trying to kill me!
02:02Only to find out later that it was Zane the stagehand. He would fall asleep and just let the flat fall whenever.
02:08The second reason, the second fight was because Cheryl was determined to have the paint, the room painted Pepto-Bismol pink.
02:19They had taken these new girls to L.A. here. They would not bring us. Jennifer Holliday came. Debbie Burrell.
02:30They wouldn't even let us come. On top of that, they sent pictures of this beautiful dressing room with a sofa that was pink.
02:38And Cheryl was determined to upgrade!
02:41She was not having it. And on top of that, every night we had to go down to the basement, downstairs to the basement,
02:52cross the basement stairs, go back up the, cross the basement, go back up the stairs to the stage.
02:59And they had put a huge poster of the new girls in these skimpy outfits on the door.
03:06The picture vanished! Nobody knew what happened to the picture!
03:12One day, Cheryl Lee, when we were crossing, said, Loretta, you want to know where to see the poster?
03:22I was like, where is the poster?
03:24There was a brick on the floor in front of the door. She moved the brick, and there it was.
03:30It was like rolling away the stone in the Bible.
03:37I was amazed that, I just was amazed at how creative she was.
03:43And to this day, I'm amazed at her ability to get things done.
03:50That's Cheryl Lee Ralph. She was strong then, and she still is strong.