Caffey's Cookin'

Former performer now creates his own shows

The "glass ceiling" isn't only a feature of the corporate world. It exists in the performing arts too. With so many prominent performers of colour, the barriers are not always obvious, but many artists around Broadway and the opera world know from experience that doors are closed for them.

It was for this reason, among others, that in about 1996, American actor Marion J. Caffey turned away from performing and began creating his own shows. "I didn't think I wanted to ask people for jobs for the rest of my life," he says. "In a way I still do... but I have a lot more control over my career as a writer/director/choreographer than I did as an actor."

Perhaps intentionally, much of Caffey's work provides springboards and opportunities for black performers. For instance, after the success of the Three Tenors, he recruited three African American operatic vocalists (Victor Trent Cook, Rodrick Dixon and Thomas Young) into a show called Three Mo' Tenors, featuring great opera arias along with Broadway, jazz, soul and R&B. It has been wildly successful as a live show and was also taped for the PBS Great Performances Series.

"Opera has got to be the most racist art form," says Caffey. "The bluebloods circle their wagons." But once the show became a hit, the "Three Mo' Tenors" found that they weren't very interested in taking calls from the opera companies. "We've created a new game, and now we own the game," says Caffey. "The landscape has changed."

Caffey's current project, Cookin' at the Cookery, is a musical play about blues singer Alberta Hunter, billed in her day as the "Sweetheart of Dreamland". She was a colleague of the likes of Paul Robeson, King Creole, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, and among her distinctions is that she was the first African-American singer to be backed up by a white band. Caffey first encountered her when a friend gave him a video called My Castle's Rockin'.

"I lost my mind," Caffey says. "I was completely embarrassed that I had never heard about this woman." What captivated him so strongly was "the absolute celebration of life that this woman had at 82, a pure, unadulterated joy for what she does and the ability to make that contagious among the people experiencing her. Man! First of all, for her to come through the camera like this! It's charisma in its purest form!"

Caffey is directing a production of Cookin' at the Cookery with Jackie Richardson as Alberta Hunter that plays in Winnipeg before opening a three-week Toronto run. Jazz pianist Joe Sealy is the musical director for this production, which will represent the sixteenth and seventeenth times the show been mounted.

Although he says that new productions of Cookin' at the Cookery are still taking up far more of his time that he would have imagined, Caffey is already working on a follow-up to Three Mo' Tenors called Three Mo' Divas. He's ecstatic at the calibre of women who turned out to audition for the inaugural production in San Diego: so far he has 17 outstanding possibilities for the three roles, and not one is yet a "name" singer.

"The point is that no one does know who they are," says Caffey, "but when you hear them, you think 'How have I missed them?' If it has half the success of Three Mo' Tenors... Well, just tell them to look out for Three Mo' Divas!"

CanStage presents Cookin' at the Cookery from November 13 to December 6 at the Bluma Appel Theatre of the St. Lawrence Centre. For tickets, call CanStage (416-368-3110) or Ticketmaster (416-872-1111), or visit www.canstage.com.

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