Jazz singer Alberta Hunter’s comeback in the 1970s and ’80s defied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum about American lives lacking second acts. Hers had not only a second act but an unlikely third as well. Born in Memphis in 1895, Hunter enjoyed a respectable career as a club attraction in the 1920s and ’30s before retiring at age 61. Then she became a nurse and retired again, in 1977. But not for long, since Barney Josephson, owner of the Cookery, a jazz club in Greenwich Village, got her on stage again. "He had the idea of bringing some seniors back to sing Sunday through Thursday," explains Marion J. Caffey, who wrote and directs Cookin’ at the Cookery, a musical revue about Hunter’s life that the Huntington Theatre Company will present June 20 through 29.
Hunter was a sensation at the Cookery and quickly earned a devoted following with her ribald songs and deadpan delivery. Before long, she was a regular guest on the talk-show circuit, with fans half, a third, and a quarter her age.
The Huntington’s Cookin’ at the Cookery features Ernestine Jackson reprising her role as Hunter (she appeared in the show’s 1997 world premiere at the Hippodrome State Theatre) and Montego Glover as the narrator who helps track Hunter’s improbable career path and plays her at an earlier age. Playwright Caffey had been fascinated by Hunter since seeing a PBS documentary about her some years back. "I was completely blown away," he says. "First, embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of her. But I had to let more people know about her, and the only way I know how to do that was through the theater." Caffey had directed or choreographed works ranging from The All Night Strut to Little Shop of Horrors. But Hunter posed a special challenge because he needed to re-create the decades of her life that preceded her late-period incandescence.
In her earlier years, he says, "she was doing Broadway more than true swing or jazz." Hunter also appeared as Queenie, opposite Paul Robeson, in a London production of Show Boat, and "her contemporaries were Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington. Not until she met Louis Armstrong at the Dreamland Club in Chicago in 1923 did her style of music change. Her voice as a younger woman was much higher, but you have to remember that she was singing in a more romantic period of song styles with all that pseudo-operatic singing."
Hunter’s voice during the ’70s and ’80s had changed considerably, Caffey discovered. As an 82-year-old, "she had a sense of delivering a song that most young people and middle-aged people have not mastered. Her voice was nothing like a normal voice — she didn’t have the breath to sustain notes at her age, but it was her amazing delivery of those tunes and singing those double-entendre sexy songs that brought another flavor that you hadn’t expected. A 40-year-old singing about her handyman and an 82-year-old is something very different. Her ability to wink and be brazen just thrilled me."
Caffey also discovered that the woman behind the wink and leer was a paradox. "She was tenacious — there was no telling Alberta ‘no,’ because she’d just go through another door to get what she needed. She was very intelligent and could squeeze a dollar ’til the eagle grinned." And how does he explain Hunter’s mid-period nursing career? "She also had this undying need to serve people. Before and after the nursing, it was through the music."
Cookin’ at the Cookery is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, June 20 through 29. Tickets are $32 to $47; call (617) 266-0800 or visit www.huntingtontheatre.org.
