LaChanze Sings at the Allen Room LaChanze at the Allen Room as part of the American Songbook series. Last month LaChanze, the winsome Broadway star who won a 2006 Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a musical ("The Color Purple"), turned 50. That milestone wouldn't be worth noting had she not announced it on Thursday night at the Allen Room, where she appeared as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. Her concert was also a 10th anniversary; she last visited the series in 2002 at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. LaChanze won that Tony for originating the role of Celie in the Broadway adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. Her character's signature song, "I'm Here," an assertion of emotional resilience, was the centerpiece of a show whose selections often focused on growing up and shedding illusions. Even now LaChanze projects an appealing ingenuousness. No matter how forcefully she belts, her voice carries a touch of girlish lightness. That natural buoyancy helped her to infuse "Nine," an idyllic childhood reverie of being at an age "when any child could wear a paper crown and be a king or queen," with a refreshing immediacy. "Glitter in the Air," the 2010 hit for Pink, and Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" bolstered the theme of losing one's innocence and gaining the courage to face life alone. (In 2001 LaChanze lost her husband, Calvin Gooding, in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.) Her good-humored maturity was reflected not only in her song choices but also in arrangements that infused her brand of pop-soul with strong Afro-Caribbean rhythms grounded in Steven Kroon's percussion and Clint de Ganon's drums. The other members of the band, directed by its pianist, Jason Howland, included Marc Copley on guitar and Chris Lightcap on bass. For all the hard life lessons the songs describe, LaChanze didn't display a trace of bitterness. Not even the Anita Baker hit "Fairy Tales," whose narrator recalls being regaled by her mother with fantasies of happily ever after, then waking up years later "in the wilderness, alone in the cold," could dampen her spirits. The feeling she conveyed was a calm acceptance of reality.