Lady Stout
Flint Street Family theater
New Haven
March 19, 2026
She strutted into the theater, clad from head to toe in bejeweled red. She spun. She twirled. Then came her breathtaking range, from whisper-soft to soulful to operatic seemingly in a single phrase.
“I am unapologetic in my power,” Lady Stout, the jazz, gospel, and R&B recording artist, proclaimed to a sold-out crowd at a rousing tribute to the legendary singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist Nina Simone at the Flint Street Theater on Friday night. “Nina showed me how.”
The program, which took place in the Friends Center for Children Flint Street Family Campus, included a pre-show on the grand piano in the lobby with Lady Stout’s 15-year-old son Hubert Powell IV, also known as Hubeats, an accomplished musician and producer in his own right. It opened with Nehway, a singer-songwriter from Waterbury.
The purpose of the evening, as Lady Stout put it, was plain: “To celebrate the icon that is Nina Simone.” The New Haven native, whose name derives from the raw power of her voice and her commanding stage presence, went further, transforming the space at the former Cine-4 into a festive—and, at times, fiery—revival meeting.
“Dear Nina,” she began, standing against a backdrop of black-and-white clips showing Nina Simone on stage, in protest marches, her hands flying across the piano keys. “It was so many years ago when I discovered you in the Swiss Alps.”
It was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the early 2000s. Lady Stout, then known as Denise Renee, was touring with Alicia Keys. (She’s also shared the stage with Patti LaBelle, Stevie Wonder, and Quincy Jones.) A playback of Simone’s performance at the same festival in the 1970s was being aired. “I watched you on the screen,” she intoned, “and I couldn’t take my eyes off you. That was the moment that changed my life. You let me know who I could be. I was there as a background singer and I left as a leader.”
“Some labeled her controversial,” Lady Stout went on. “No, she was just real. She taught me I can wear my hair short, I can wear a long weave, I can be dark-skinned, light-skinned, fair-skinned, it doesn’t matter, we can be exactly who we are, so I’m feeling good.”
“We feelin’ good too,” someone shouted from the audience.
Then came the Simone standard, “Four Women,” which has each character in turn describing the way she is seen and treated in society and what “they” call her. “My skin is black, my arms are long, my hair is woolly, my back is strong,” Lady Stout sang out, before taking to the drums, her original instrument; she started at age 3 at Apostolic Love and Faith Tabernacle on Hallock Street in the Hill, where her great-grandmother was pastor.
In a deft generational nod, she and her son Hubeats engaged in a drum-off of sorts, the song building in intensity.
“What do they call me?” Lady Stout asked, her voice crackling with emotion. “What do they call me?” she repeated, more insistent.
“My name is Stout!” she triumphantly proclaimed. The audience went wild.
Family features large for Lady Stout, who spent 10 years raising her four children in New Haven after touring with Keys. That was apparent throughout the evening but no more so than in “Sinnerman,” Simone’s timeless masterpiece, which had her inviting her three daughters—Tamia, Zoe, and Cadence—to the stage not to back her up but to front her.
“My pride and joy,” she said, as she exhorted the crowd to clap their hands.
“I was raised in a good ‘ol fashioned apostolic church, so get up on your feet right now,” she shouted, shaking a tambourine, amid the plinking, pulsating keyboard of Jeremiah Fuller, Betcherly Calixte’s driving bass,and the rhythmic clapping of her daughters.
“Power,” she called out, marching up and down the aisle, lights flashing.
“Power,” the crowd called back.
“We are not helpless,” she declared, in full command of her gifts as master musician, performer, and orator—and, above all, as artist that is unabashedly herself. “We have the power to change the world.”
