Leslie Uggams doesn't spend much time counting backwards, except maybe when other performers boast about their 50 or so years in show business. "I start adding up my own years, and I go, 'Please, that's nothing.' But that's usually the only time I really think about it," she said. "I believe in reinventing yourself, moving on, trying different things."
It was in 1950, at age 6, that Uggams made her first professional appearance, on TV's Beulah show. Now in her early 70s, she has been finding new doors opening to her, including a summer run in Connecticut as Mama Rose in Gypsy, and an upcoming Florida engagement as the title character in Mame. These are the kind of choice roles, not long available to an African-American performer, that are now beckoning her. "I'm always the first one to want to dive off the cliff," she said recently from her home in New York.
This summer, she also reprised her cabaret show, Classic Uggams, at 54 Below, and it gets its first hearing outside New York on Nov. 2 in the Venetian Room as part of Bay Area Cabaret's season. "I try to associate the songs with stories, and you know I have a lot of stories," she said. "There are some laughs in the show. We have a good time."
Of course, there are songs from Hallelujah, Baby!, the 1967 musical that won her a Tony Award, and she will dip into Lena Horne's repertoire because she starred in the bio musical Stormy Weather. There will be Jerry Herman songs, reflecting her time with Jerry's Girls on Broadway. And she'll sing the cockeyed rendition of "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" that made her a YouTube sensation when she fitted nonsense syllables onto the melody after the cue-card man fell during a live outdoor broadcast. "I amaze myself," she said about memorizing the random sounds she had once improvised.
Just before heading off to star in Gypsy, she told audiences at 54 Below that she was about to be "the first chocolate brownie that's gonna be Mama Rose." The musical, about a stage mother railroading her kids into show business, had particular relevance since she saw plenty of young victims during her early years, even if she wasn't one of them.
"I knew that world very well, and it was frightening," she said. "But I was very fortunate because it was a friend who got the attention of my parents, saying, she has talent, and started taking me off to auditions. I was a ham, I loved to sing, and I enjoyed it very much. I didn't come from a family that had a lot of money, but I didn't have parents who depended on me to live. My father brought the money into the house."
Uggams was a regular at the Apollo Theatre by the time she was 9, and found herself embraced by such fellow performers as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. "To me it was like summer camp," she said. "I did my little act, came off stage, and went to the dressing room and got out my coloring book." She gained national fame in the early 60s when Mitch Miller asked her to join the cast of his popular TV show Sing Along with Mitch.
Not long after Sing Along ended its run, Uggams met her future husband, Grahame Pratt, while performing in Australia. It also led to an awkward early encounter with Lena Horne that had started on a high note. "Lena pinned me as a Delta in 1965," Uggams said, referring to the Delta Sigma Theta sorority dedicated to encouraging college education among African-American women. "I was engaged to marry my husband, and my mother and I were at the Delta luncheon, and Lena turned to my mother and said, 'Don't let her marry him.' And I was shocked. 'Oh my God, what does she mean? How can she say that? I'm so in love.'"
It was a few years before Uggams figured out that Horne was unhappy in her interracial marriage to Hollywood conductor and arranger Lenny Hayton, and was trying to steer Uggams away from the same path. "It was also the time Lena was very involved with civil rights, and she was going around talking to women in the South, so there was a lot going on that as a young lady I didn't know. Of course, this week my husband and I will be celebrating 49 years of marriage."
Uggams has numerous "first African-American woman to �"" credits in her biography. "I'm kind of proud of that because I'm breaking barriers," she said, "but at the same time when it comes time for people to come see what I'm doing, I better be doing what I'm supposed to be doing."
Horne's trademark song "Stormy Weather" is part of the Classic Uggams song list. Asked what she would choose for her own title song, Uggams took a pause before suggesting "Being Good" from the Hallelujah, Baby! score. "In the show's story-line, it's the fact that the character is black and she has to be better than good," she said, "but for me it's, like, don't settle for mediocre. And I never have."
Leslie Uggams will perform Classic Uggams at 5 p.m. Nov. 2 in the Fairmont Hotel's Venetian Room. Tickets are $45-$50. Call 392-4400 or go to bayareacabaret.org.