Juanita Hall

Born on 6 November 1901 in Keysport, New Jersey, and passing away on 28 February 1968 in Bay Shore, New York, Juanita Hall first attended the Juilliard School of Music and Drama before taking up singing and minor stage parts along the eastern seaboard. She stepped onto a Broadway stage in 1935 for the revival of Sailor Beware! Over the ensuing years her principal activity remained vocal work that drew on current popular material, folk pieces and blues numbers, and she cut six sides for Victor Records with trombonist Bennie Morton’s orchestra providing accompaniment. Opportunities for substantial parts remained scarce for Black performers until the middle 1940s, when her fortunes improved. She joined the ensemble of Sing Out Sweet Land in 1944 and appeared in the 1946 revival of Show Boat, after which she advanced to featured supporting roles in St. Louis Woman (1946) and Street Scene (1947). The following year she was chosen to play Bloody Mary in the original Rodgers and Hammerstein production South Pacific, nightly stopping the show with her renditions of “Bali Ha’i” and “Happy Talk.” In 1954 she took the part of Madam Tango in House of Flowers.

Hall returned to the same character for the 1958 motion-picture adaptation of South Pacific, though her vocals were unexpectedly supplied by Muriel Smith. That same year she portrayed Madame Liang in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song on Broadway and also released the album Juanita Sings the Blues, backed by a jazz ensemble directed by pianist Claude Hopkins and featuring trumpeter Doc Cheatham together with tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. She revisited the screen in 1961 for the film version of Flower Drum Song, after which she withdrew from public performance.