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High heat
Alberta Hunter cooks at the Huntington
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Cookin’ at the Cookery
Written and directed by Marion J. Caffey. Musical supervision and arrangements by Danny Colgate. Set and lighting design by Dale F. Jordan. Costumes by Marilyn A. Wall. Sound design by Benjamin Emerson. With Ernestine Jackson and Montego Glover. Music performed by Pieter Struyk (drums), Steve Skop (bass), Joe Battaglia (guitar), and music director Darryl Ivey (piano). Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through June 29.


The vocalist Alberta Hunter seems an unlikely heroine for a musical tribute written just six years ago. After all, the jazz-influenced style of blues singing that she helped pioneer had been out of vogue for more than two decades by the time it was almost entirely erased from popular perceptions of the genre with the arrival of a new generation of high-volume, guitar-wielding Caucasian bluesmen in the 1960s. And most of her recordings are out of print. Yet Hunter’s story — of triumph, defeat, and triumph again — is classic stage fodder. And Hunter was herself a classic performer, full of the rich grace and wit that was a requirement for frontpersons in the age of nascent jazz and vaudeville — the period when she became a star.

Marion J. Caffey was inspired to write this musical biography after seeing a film of one of Hunter’s comeback performances. Caffey’s study of Hunter allowed him to draw on the singer’s own voice with authority, and he often quotes Hunter verbatim in his dialogue. As a result, Hunter’s charm and candor are the real stars of Cookin’ at the Cookery, and Alberta’s ability to fascinate and entertain remains even when channeled through Caffey’s pen and the warm talents of actresses Ernestine Jackson and Montego Glover.

This is the second time Cookin’ has hit a local stage. In 2001, Caffey also directed a production at Lowell’s Merrimack Repertory Theatre. Although the spare staging is similar, the balance of comedy and drama that was on display at the Merrimack has been tilted in favor of laughs at the Huntington. Twice-Tony-nominated actress Jackson lays into her lines a bit more broadly than Ann Duquesnay did as the senior Alberta and Alberta’s mother in Lowell, but Glover, who appeared in Broadway’s Dreamgirls, plays the young Alberta with more control and less broad mugging than Debra Walton at Merrimack. Jackson also captures Hunter’s proud carriage and musical delivery with authority, beautifully mimicking the deep, slightly sibilant voice of the singer’s older years.

Cookin’ at the Cookery is based on Hunter’s 1977 comeback concert at Greenwich Village nightspot the Cookery at age 82. But it tells the story of her childhood in Memphis, her migration to Chicago in search of a musical career, and her arrival at the apex of the blossoming blues recording world of the 1920s, when she shared stages with jazz legends Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. From there she went on to conquer Broadway — to the extent that an African-American could during the reign of Jim Crow — and Europe. When in the 1950s her career hit the skids, she lopped 12 years off her age, entered nursing school, and spent two decades tending the sick in a New York City hospital until her Cookery date, after which she once again enjoyed world renown as a performer — and achieved her childhood dream of singing for a president (Jimmy Carter) — until her death, at age 89, in 1984.

Hunter lived an astonishingly full life, and Caffey and her Huntington cast capture all its joy simply and solidly. Jackson and Glover take turns at the roles of narrator and Alberta to propel the story, often joining to harmonize in one of Hunter’s double-entendre-laden songs like " Rough and Ready Man " or " Handy Man, " or to bring another character briefly to life. Usually it’s Glover who steps into the shoes of a figure like Cookery owner Barney Josephson, Louis Armstrong, or the administrator who forces Hunter to leave her beloved nursing job, and she plays them all with broad comic exaggeration.

The Huntington production’s only failing is that the story’s three tragic turns ring light. When Glover as young Alberta tells her mother that she’s been molested, she registers little emotion. And when Alberta receives news of her mother’s death and is dismissed from her nursing job, what were sad and potent moments at the Merrimack breeze by. Nonetheless, with Hunter’s sharp one-liners and 17 well-delivered songs at the fore, Cookin’ at the Cookery is a crowd pleaser as well as an inspiring tale of a life well lived.

Issue Date: June 27 - July 3, 2003
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