Juanita Hall (née Long, November 6, 1901 – February 29, 1968) was an American musical theatre and film actress. She is remembered for her roles in the original stage and screen versions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals South Pacific as Bloody Mary – a role that garnered her a Tony Award – and Flower Drum Song as Madame Liang.
Born in Keyport, New Jersey, to an African-American father and Irish-American mother , Hall (along with three siblings) was raised by her maternal grandparents after her mother's death. She attended Bordentown Industrial School and graduated from Keyport High School. She also received classical training at the Juilliard School. Soon after she finished high school, Hall worked in the Lincoln settlement house in East Orange, New Jersey, teaching music to children during the day and to and adult chorus at night.
Hall began singing and playing small roles in theatrical productions on the eastern seaboard. In 1935, she appeared in a Broadway revival of Sailor Beware! Mostly, over the next few years she sang, her repertoire ranging through popular songs of the day to folk
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music and the blues. She made some recordings, including six sides for Victor Records, accompanied by jazz trombonist Bennie Morton and his orchestra. In those days, there never were enough major roles for black artists but things improved somewhat for Hall from the mid-40s onwards. She had a place in the chorus in Sing Out Sweet Land (1944) and a revival of Show Boat (1946). After moving up to small supporting roles in St. Louis Woman (1946) and Street Scene (1947).
A leading black Broadway performer in her day, she was personally chosen by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to perform the roles she played in the musicals South Pacific and Flower Drum Song, as a Tonkinese woman and a Chinese-American, respectively.
Inspired as a child by blues legend Bessie Smith, she only recorded one album of blues in her lifetime. In 1957, she recorded Juanita Hall Sings the Blues (at Beltone Studios in New York City), backed by a group of jazz musicians that included Claude Hopkins, Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, Doc Cheatham, and George
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Duvivier. In 1958, she reprised Bloody Mary in the film version of South Pacific, for which her singing part was dubbed (because of legal matters involving copyright), at Richard Rodgers's request, by Muriel Smith, who had played the role in the London production. The same year, Hall starred in Flower Drum Song, another Broadway show by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
She also toured in the road show version of Flower Drum Song, but she had to leave it in early 1962 because of illness. But she was able to appear on stage in 1966 in A Woman and the Blues, a tribute blues singers Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters. Hall spent her final years in poverty after an investment in a New York City restaurant, The Fortune Cookie, failed. In her later years, diabetes led to blindness.
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Because she had little money, the Actors Fund of America supported her in its Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, and in then on Long Island, where she died in 1968 from complications of her illness.
Hall is remembered as a consummate professional and a thoughtful colleague. "I think everyone who had anything to do with her loved her," wrote Richard Rodgers, as quoted in Notable Black American Women. "As an actress, she was…a joy to work with."
(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)
Even though Juanita Hall sang in close to 900 performances of "South Pacific" on Broadway, according to vocal arranger Ken Darby her voice had taken on a much heavier tone by 1957 and she was having trouble sustaining high notes. Music director Alfred Newman thought that it was unnecessary to dub her and asked Ken to work with Hall on smoothing out her voice to a level and vocal style that Richard Rodgers would approve. By the time of the recording sessions she was singing better than she had in the original 1949 stage production, but even though she achieved a vocal quality closer to what Rodgers preferred, Rodgers was 