SWEET MAMA STRINGBEAN
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There were also man problems, starting with Waters’s marriage as a young teenager to a fellow in his 20s. Her love life seems to have set a pattern of choosing men on the basis of their tendency to abusiveness and infidelity–not surprising, considering her unstable and fatherless childhood. But despite–or maybe because of–the pain imposed on her by circumstances and her own temperament, Waters achieved considerable success in her career as a vaudeville and Broadway performer in the years spanning the first and second world wars. Most people today know Waters, if at all, as the matronly maid in the movie The Member of the Wedding; but that performance was in fact a comeback for a woman known in her youth as the sassy and sexy “Sweet Mama Stringbean” who shimmied her way through the “Heebie Jeebies” and later crooned the classic love song “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe.”
Most important, Waters did what she did on her own terms–which is why actress-writer Jackie Taylor has chosen Waters as the subject of her new show, Sweet Mama Stringbean. As part of an ongoing effort to promote greater awareness of black achievement, Taylor’s Black Ensemble has previously dramatized the lives of Muddy Waters and Otis Redding in musical plays authored by Taylor and the fine drummer Jimmy Tillman; now, Taylor and musical director Tillman have turned to Waters’s autobiography as the source of a vehicle for Taylor herself.
Marlene Zuccaro’s staging of Taylor’s play is fluid and dotted with strong, though caricatured, performances by a four-person ensemble who play a variety of roles. (Gregory Vincent Puckett, as the all-purpose man in Waters’s life, proves himself a strong stage presence and an articulate, athletic dancer in Bobby Andrews’s bubbling vaudevillian choreography.) For extra measure, there’s a cameo performance by singer Audrey “Queen” Roy as Bessie Smith, with whom the younger Waters found herself competing. Taylor nicely captures the mixture of embarrassment, awe, and impatience inherent in the timeless, oft-repeated situation of a rising star clashing with the role model she admires.
