Lillias White, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress with the powerhouse voice, brings her autobiographical show “Brooklyn to Broadway” to Pittsburgh Monday.

The two-show Trust Cabaret night is a long time in coming. The previous time Ms. White graced a Pittsburgh stage was in the late 1970s, when she was just starting out and playing Dorothy on what she calls the “bus and truck tour” of “The Wiz.”

She has eased on down to a four-decade career of steady work on stage and screen.

Time Out New York has enthused, “Nobody stops a show like Broadway’s Lillias White, who has built a career out of super-powered numbers.” And New York Times cabaret reviewer Stephen Holden has said of her range, “Lillias White is a singer who makes the most challenging vocal feats look almost easy. Endowed with endless stamina and exuberance, she marches jubilantly across stylistic borders like Napoleon’s army sweeping through Europe.”

Ms. White started out like many a would-be singer — with a hairbrush microphone, in front of a mirror. Except she had the voice to back it up.

Her cabaret show, accompanied by pianist Timothy Graphenreed, tells of her growing up in Brooklyn with a mother from Jamaica-West Indies and a father from South Carolina. Family gatherings were filled with “wonderful food” and artists seated around the table — uncles who painted or did wood-cutting or played the piano and an aunt who made wigs, just right for a girl intent on performing.

“I was always encouraged to listen to different kinds of music,” Ms. White recalled. “My mother bought me 45s and show-tune albums, and I was renowned for staying in my house and looking at the mirror in the living room with a spoon or a hairbrush, and that would be my microphone. I was just this little girl who would be in the living room or up on my grandmother’s dining room table, singing.”

She listened to “everything — Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Dinah Washington and all the Motown stuff.”

Her show will include some of her inspirations, and a medley “of some of the shows I’ve been lucky enough to be in.”

Those include “The Life” and her Tony-winning role as featured actress in a musical. She swept the Broadway awards season playing the street walker Sonja, in the show about 42nd Street in its seedier, sleazier days.

Her first Broadway show was as a replacement in “Barnum,” starring Jim Dale. She recalled, “At one point, Jim went on vacation and Tony Orlando came in. And he was just so sexy and cool. It was a wonderful treat to do that show.”

When original actress Terry White was injured, she took over the role of Joice Heth, a former slave who was exhibited by P.T. Barnum with the claim that she was the 161-year-old nursing mammy of George Washington.

Her daughter was a year old when she joined “Barnum” in 1981, and she still feels lucky and appreciative to have had that first experience with a welcoming cast and crew.

“It was fun for [my daughter], to see all the balloons and the clown faces, and it was a wonderful experience for me. It taught me a lot,”

She went on to Broadway roles including Effie in “Dreamgirls,” Grizabella in “Cats,” Asaka in “Once on This Island” and a Tony nomination in “Fela!”

You may recognize her voice as the lead muse, Calliope, in the animated movie “Hercules,” or from another show popular with kids.

As Lillian Edwards on “Sesame Street” from 1989-93, Ms. White voiced the pink lead singer of the Squirrelles and received a Daytime Emmy Award for the role in 1992. The fuzzy girl group inspired by the Shirelles performed such numbers as “Don’t Be a Tough Nut to Crack,” a spoof of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”

She was doing double duty in those days, on “Sesame Street” and on Broadway, in “Once on This Island.”

The current revival of the Flaherty-Ahrens musical “is a beautiful production; great performances,” she said of the new “Once on This Island. “I really enjoyed the cultural aspect of it. The stage floor is sand, like a real beach and there are clothes hanging all around and there’s a voodoo shrine there, and it really reflects the culture of the people, more so than what was possible when we did it at the Booth Theatre.”

Although she hasn’t been to Pittsburgh since that tour of “The Wiz,” she feels connected to the city, having “been fortunate enough to perform in a few August Wilson plays. That’s been a highlight of my career, because I think he was a brilliant writer and I got to meet him a couple of times. He was a nice guy.”

In 2014, Ms. White starred in the off-Broadway debut of Billy Porter’s “While I Yet Live,” about growing up among strong women in Pittsburgh.

Now she is coming here to share her own growing-up story, from Brooklyn to Broadway.

Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.

First Published: April 13, 2018, 4:00 a.m.