Bio-Musicals: You Hear Blues, Theaters See Green

Bernardine Mitchell won a Helen Hayes Award in 2005 for her star turn in "Mahalia" at MetroStage, and perhaps should have won another in the 1990s as Bessie Smith in "Bessie's Blues" at the Studio Theatre. And lest it should seem that this is strictly a female phenomenon, Jimi Ray Malary has earned repeat gigs at MetroStage crooning tributes to Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole.

A late casting change has MetroStage bringing in two tested performers as the senior of the two Alberta Hunters featured in "Cookin'." Ernestine Jackson is flying in from Chicago for the first two weeks of the run; Jackson originated the role a decade ago in Florida. ("Cookin' " has played three dozen theaters since then; creator-director Marion J. Caffey -- who has since assembled the comparably scaled "Three Mo' Tenors" and "3 Mo' Divas" -- says, "I couldn't believe how much money you could make in an 800-seat theater selling out every night.")

For the last five weeks, Jackson will hand off to Jackie Richardson, who garnered an award playing the part in Toronto.

If biography seems to be part of the draw, Griffin says, "I don't think it should be surprising, especially when it's about people who made it out of the Deep South in the early part of the 20th century and had international lives. These are extraordinary stories."

Whether black plays get as much nurturing as black musicals is a fraught issue, but the fact that musicals tend to be an easier sell than plays is not news. That seems to go double when, as Smith points out, people already know and love the music and musicians in question.

Smith, in fact, even draws a useful comparison between small-scale, big-yield biographical shows and one of the unstoppable trends on Broadway in recent years: the jukebox musical, fueled by the pop catalogues of such acts as Abba and the Four Seasons.

Only with these jazz-blues bio-musicals, Smith notes, "it's an older jukebox."