By Robert Nesti

Two years ago, LaChanze stood on the stage of the Berklee Performance Center to accept an honorary doctorate from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. On Sunday she was back, this time with a band and a set list built for dancing. Presented by Vivo Performing Arts, the concert gave the five-time Tony winner — one for acting, four for producing — a chance to show a looser, more playful side than Broadway audiences usually get to see.

Looking stunning in a shimmering green dress accessorized with red shoes, LaChanze straddled pop, jazz and Broadway with a 15-song set that, she said at the start, focused on two of her favorite things: rhythm and love. Accompanied by five musicians and two backup singers, she opened with a jazzy “Them There Eyes” that established an immediate rapport with the audience. Anyone who has seen her onstage in such shows as Once on This Island, Ragtime and The Color Purple (for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical) knows her mezzo-soprano has great range and dramatic power. In concert, she showed a different side — warm and free-spirited — and she did so without missing a beat, moving about the stage in what could be called the LaChanze strut.

Throughout her set, she paid tribute to great female pop stars, beginning with Chaka Khan and a full-throated version of “Love Has Fallen on Me,” a song Khan recorded on her 1978 solo debut album. On the subject of love, she also addressed its flip side, heartbreak, with an anecdote about her first breakup: wailing on the floor of her first New York apartment, she turned to her mother for advice. “Drink a glass of water,” she was told — which, she added, was her mother’s answer to any crisis.

LaChanze recalled how, as a teenager, she would do the “dip and rise” while lip-syncing to Diana Ross and the Supremes in her bedroom. She demonstrated the move before honoring Ross with a version of her pop hit “Last Time I Saw Him.” The mood shifted for a downbeat take on “Losing My Mind,” from Sondheim’s Follies, which she sang not as a dramatic torch song but with jazzy introspection — a reminder that her Broadway and pop instincts are never far apart. She then bounced back with “I Can See Clearly Now,” showing her gospel roots with rafter-raising affirmation.

She acknowledged her turn on Broadway as disco diva Donna Summer in the 2018 jukebox bio-musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical with two classics: “On the Radio” and “Last Dance.” While the arrangements were more pop than synthesized disco, her performance brought to mind how much she has in common with Summer. LaChanze’s voice is deeper, but both are rooted in gospel and theater, a kinship that came through most vividly on “Last Dance.”

Toward the end, she offered a glorious take on “Speak Your Name,” a deeply emotional anthem of hope and legacy, and urged the audience to seek out other songs by its composer, Crystal Monee Hall. For her encore, she returned to The Color Purple for a searing “I’m Here” — a showstopper if there ever was one, and proof that the power she brings to a Broadway stage loses nothing when she lets loose.

For upcoming events sponsored by Vivo Performing Arts, visit their website at this link.