246.
SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF
Each
season brings with it a slew of new one-man or one-woman plays, among which are
usually a few that are based on the lives of famous people. Obviously, the more
familiar the person and the more distinct their personality the more of a
challenge there is for the performer to overcome, since no one is ever fully
capable of impersonating a recognizable celebrity to everyone’s satisfaction. This
is true, of course, of full-length shows in which famous personages play a
part, like those on Broadway this season featuring actors portraying Pres.
Johnson, Carole King, and Janis Joplin. But the demands of a solo performance,
where there’s little else to distract you from the person on stage, are
particularly difficult. Last season, Holland Taylor did a remarkable job of
playing Gov. Ann Richardson in ANN; by the end of the performance, you really
felt as if you’d just spent a chunk of time in the late governor’s white-haired
presence.
This season, despite various works
featuring solo performances, those concerned with well-known celebrities have not been much in
evidence. Apart from TEA FOR THREE, in which Elaine Bromka attempted to give us
Linda Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, and Betty Ford, the only other example is
SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF, now at the Westside Theatre, and being given what many
consider a tour de force performance of trumpeter-singer Louis Armstrong, the man who some say invented jazz, by John
Douglas Thompson.
Armstrong, affectionately known as “Satchmo,”
is seen in his realistically depicted (by Lee Savage) dressing room at the
Waldorf Astoria in March 1971, four months before he died; somewhat stooped, and complaining of his various physical ailments--the first thing he says is that he "shit" himself--at age
70, he turns on a tape recorder, saying he’s writing his memoirs, and begins to
rattle on about his life in his famously friendly way, handkerchief always at
the ready, telling us about his growing up in the colorful but seedy Storyville
section of New Orleans (where his Mama was a whore), of his troubled youth, his being befriended by a
wealthy Jewish family, his acquisition of his first trumpet, his association
with gangsters like Al Capone, his four wives, his fondness for marijuana, and so on. Using a healthy dose of profanity—the kind
of language one wouldn’t have associated with his public persona—he also
discusses his position within the black-white world of his times, and how he
had to suffer the indignities of the Jim Crow laws when touring the South,
forcing him and his musicians to eat in the welcoming kitchens—staffed by black
employees—of hotels and restaurants that wouldn’t let them in the front door. Much
is made of his unhappiness when he became so successful with white audiences
because of his appealing smile and charisma that he turned black audiences off,
and found not only that his jazz artistry was derided by other blacks, but that
he was considered something of an Uncle Tom, a “clown” even, by a new
generation of black artists, like Miles Davis, also enacted by Mr. Thompson. This despite Armstrong's outrage at President Eisenhower's handling of what happened in Little Rock.
The play is the work of Terry
Teachout, theatre critic of the Wall
Street Journal, and a biographer of famous black musicians, including not
only Armstrong but, more recently, Duke Ellington. Mr. Teachout knows his subject
as well as anyone, and to help tell his story he introduces Joe Glaser, the
Jewish manager who handled Armstrong’s career for 40 years on the basis of nothing but a
friendly handshake. This being a solo show, Mr. Thompson also plays Glaser,
which he does with swift shifts of physicality and voice timed to the sudden
changing of the lights (designed by Kevin Adams). Glaser would be unfamiliar to almost every audience
member, so Mr. Thompson is free to alter his gravelly delivery of Armstrong’s
lines and his somewhat shuffling movements and affect a more generic white man’s
manner and tone, although he gives Glaser an equal dose of depth. Glaser, it would
appear, was blackmailed by mob lawyer Sidney Korshak into cutting Armstrong out
of his rightful place in the corporation set up to control Armstrong’s career. Armstrong viewed this as an unforgivable betrayal, but nothing is shown to let us know if Armstrong ever knew why Glaser acted as he did.
The 90-minute, intermissionless
play, very well directed by Gordon Edelstein, has enough little-known information about
Satchmo’s life to keep audiences seated throughout, and Mr. Thompson does an
admirable job of suggesting his principal subject’s personality without giving a mirror image characterization. Thompson has the job
of carrying a whole show about Armstrong, and while he never fully snares the
man’s beamingly electric presence and he lacks his portliness, he nonetheless
presents a very well-acted “version” of Louis Armstrong, acceptably believable
but always with the proviso that, much as you appreciate his
accomplishment, he never makes you forget the effort. That’s why, perversely, I
appreciated him better when he was being Joe Glaser, someone I didn’t know and
in whom I could thoroughly believe.
Much as I respect the way in which
Mr. Teachout’s play and Mr. Thompson’s performance help bring the great Louis
Armstrong back to some semblance of life, I kept thinking that Armstrong was
not a storyteller but a musician, a man who was not only a brilliant trumpet
player but who, despite a sandpaper voice, could sing so expressively that he
could share a stage with the top singers of the time, like Bing Crosby. His
career took an unexpected leap, the show maintains, when he recorded “Hello,
Dolly!,” a song he dubbed "a piece of shit" but that became the
number one record in the nation, even knocking the Beatles off the charts. Although there are a few musical snatches on the tape and Mr. Thompson teases us with a few
lines from the song (and also intones a Hebrew song at one point), he never sings full out, nor does he blow his horn. As the
audience leaves at the end, we hear the real Louis singing “Hello, Dolly!” and
that’s when we fully realize what we’ve been missing in SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF.