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An unmissable night with the inimitable
Ms Elaine Stritch
ELAINE STRITCH AT LIBERTY
Shaw Theatre
I FEEL very lucky to have seen Elaine Stritch perform live.
Here is a lady whose Broadway pedigree stretches back to the golden era of the Great White Way: seeing Ethel Merman haul a drunken punter out of the theatre, sharing inebriated nights with Judy Garland, realising dreams as Stephen Sondheim’s muse and treasuring the affection and admiration of Noel Coward.
Not surprisingly she has some amazing tales to tell of her life and career and, possibly most satisfyingly of all, is open and emotional about her boyfriends, husband, alcoholism, success and failure to an almost embarrassing degree.
Yet what else would you expect from this grande dame of the stage? She has already won a Tony award for this one-woman show that is pretty much a masterclass in how perfect an award-winning show should be.
It is a fine balance: keeping the laughs flowing without seeming bitchy and smug, recalling the tragedies of one’s life without seeming maudlin, yet overlaying the whole with charm, charisma and sass.
She does not let up for a moment, taking the audience with her on a musical roller coaster. And, boy, what a ride.
She comes on stage with nothing but a tall chair and the standard Broadway uniform of loose shirt and black tights. After milking the applause, she begins with a snappy rendition of There’s No Business Like Showbusiness. Here is the first demonstration of her dynamic hand-in-glove relationship with her musical director Rob Bowman. She has her back to him and while she skips and jumps from anecdote to song, he simply flows with her, perfectly complementing her as she leaps to and fro.
She drives through Sondheim, Coward, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, among others, and remains quite riveting throughout. She has great presence, with a commanding, throaty voice, somewhat gnarled, no doubt, by years of cigarettes and alcohol.
It gives her delivery an amusing sardonic drawl, a quality she used to such successful effect in the sitcom Two’s Company with Donald Sinden that brought her a legion of UK fans in the 1970s.
She reveals how that same cutting wit lost her the part of sarcastic mum Sophia Petrillo in The Golden Girls that went to the recently deceased Estelle Getty – “I blew it,” she admits.
When placed against her stirring rendition of I’m Still Here, it’s something of a triumph that she actually still is. This is a majestic night for Stritch and unmissable if you love musical theatre.
Until August 10
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