Bold and brassy Elaine Stritch, who became a theater legend with performances in musicals by
Rodgers and Hart, Noel Coward, and Stephen Sondheim—then made audiences laugh with
an acclaimed one-woman in which she interspersed songs with reminiscences of
these and other show-business luminaries—said goodbye to the cabaret world she
had once conquered with a sold-out, five-night gig at the Cafe Carlyle in early April 2013.
I wrote a tribute to Stritch following her death in July 2014, but this particular
engagement seemed too poignant not to discuss in more detail. It brings to the
fore a question most fans wish they never have to
confront: Should favorite entertainers take their last bows at a point when their skills have
already visibly deteriorated? In other words, what kind of memories do they
want to leave their audiences?
Celebrities—including Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Liza
Minnelli, Martin Short, Michael Feinstein, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette
Peters—came out in force in April 2013 to pay tribute to the 88-year-old actress, who had already
announced that, due to a variety of ills—diabetes, eye troubles, falls leading
to a hip replacement, and small strokes—she would not only cease performing but
return to her native Michigan, to be near her nephews and nieces.
Most accounts of the engagement followed the line
laid out in a review by influential New York Times critic Stephen Holden:
pay tribute to her irrepressible spirit, but inform those about to attend what
they could expect: “For the truly faithful, just being in Ms. Stritch’s
presence was enough, but a cabaret performance it was not, and the show’s
dearth of music did seem to leave some unsatisfied.”
In one sense, Holden was perfectly correct: Stritch’s
friends were more than willing to overlook the inevitable frustration and
shortness of memory that their beloved “Stritchy” exhibited.
In truth, she probably had the group in the palm of
her hand with her first lines: “Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am? I
mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my
boyfriends—as soon I’d say ‘I gotta go home now’ they fell in love.”
Stritch first made her name in the 1952 revival of Pal Joey, in which she gave indelible
life to the number by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart about an insouciant
stripper. Several years later, she impressed Noel Coward in her appearance in Sail Away.
But she became a talent impossible to ignore in
Sondheim’s Company. That landmark
1970 musical provided numerous solo opportunities for its cast members to shine, but
arguably none made a bigger impression than Stritch, who helped make the title
of her big number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” an instantly recognizable
catchphrase for women of a certain age seeking to match their marital
disappointment with “another vodka stinger.”
The force of Stritch’s incendiary performance in
that tale of urban couples fumbling through the Age of Aquarius might have been
ephemeral but for the original-cast album. A long-shelved TV documentary by
D.A. Pennebaker about those painstaking recording sessions detailed the
actress’s continued ineffectual attempts to recapture for vinyl the magic she
had had little problem summoning nightly—as well as her eventual triumph, after
being sent home to rest.
From the various accounts of those last Carlyle
shows, it seems clear that the small, intimate band of listeners on those early
spring nights knew better than to expect songs delivered in a strong voice from
a steel-trap memory. (Even the frequent prompting of her faithful accompanist, Rob
Bowman, wasn’t always enough to get her through.)
“This is the kind of show where we don’t know what
is going to happen,” the actress said. That sense was confirmed later in the
evening when Stritch admitted that she was so scared before the show that she
had had half a drink, then again when she couldn’t always control the reactions
of the room.
Nevertheless, they had come, from what many may have guessed
might be the last time, to say thank you to a salty force of nature who had
given them stories and memories they would dine out on for the rest of their
lives.
Given Stritch’s reputation as a stage performer, I
was surprised to see from her listing on the Internet Broadway database that there was a 20-year hiatus between
Company and her next appearance on the Great White Way, in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters.
Although some of that time was in London, during her
marriage to John Bay, she made the most of one short appearance: the 1985
concert revival of Sondheim’s Follies, where
she delivered—what else?—a close-to-definitive rendition of “Broadway Baby.”
(Sondheim would continue to play a major role in her midlife-to-late life
reinvention, as she appeared for the last time on Broadway in his A Little Night Music and made his “I’m
Still Here” an integral part of her one-woman show.) It was easily enough to
get her inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.
I hope that some writer even now is at work on her
biography, interviewing those who knew her while some are still alive and their
memories are fresh. In the not-so-distant future, I wouldn’t be surprised if
some short-sighted millennial editor at a publishing house dismissed her as
being only of local interest. Stritch lived a vivid, exuberant, but complicated
life, and it would be a shame if her bright flame were extinguished amid a
fickle posterity.
(For a vividly impressionistic account of Stritch’s
next-to-last performance, see Sarah Larson’s piece in The New Yorker.)
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