Elaine Stritch: At Liberty
The Old Vic Autumn 2002

Elaine Stritch made her Broadway debut roughly fifty years ago, singing "Bongo bongo bongo, I don't want to leave the congo." She took over from Uta Hagen in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf forty years ago, and stopped the show every night thirty years ago, singing about the Ladies Who Lunch in Sondheim's Company. And this year she won her first Tony, for this show of reminiscence in anecdote, confession and song.

And you'd be a fool to miss it.

They don't make Broadway stars like they used to, and while Stritch was never quite on the level of, say, Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, she's the nearest thing we've got, and perhaps your last opportunity to see what a real star looks like. And what she looks like is pretty damn good for an old broad who admits to 77. Dressed in tights and a white shirt, she sings, dances, chats and moves furniture around with a style and - let us say it - sexiness that girls a third her age could envy.

More importantly, Stritch walks onto the Old Vic stage and takes possession of it as only a star can. Her singing voice is raspy, but then it always was, so this isn't a Sinatra-like case of hearing the shreds of what once was. I've heard the recording of Noel Coward's Sail Away, and Stritch sounds as good as she did in 1961. What's more, she's a great stylist. I defy anyone to find a better, more beautifully acted rendition of the Sondheim chestnut Broadway Baby, and if The Ladies Who Lunch has softened a little with age, it still sends chills through you.

Her chatter is a rough autobiography, with an emphasis on the rough. She openly admits that for most of her career she never set foot on a stage without a couple of drinks under her belt, and she tells a few harrowing tales of how that hurt her. On the other hand, she can be hilarious about her experiences, and there are telling and very funny anecdotes about Coward, Sondheim, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando (She was the only girl in their acting class he didn't seduce, and she still isn't sure why), and Rock Hudson (He wouldn't seduce her either, though she has figured out why).

She tells an extraordinary and possibly even true story of her adventures understudying Merman in Call Me Madam in New York while simultaneously appearing in Pal Joey in New Haven, and she gives her side of the episode in a production of The Women that almost got her censured by Equity (and makes you hope her version is true, because it's so funny).

But mostly she's just there. A real live Broadway star. The kind they don't make any more. Go.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Elaine Stritch - Old Vic 2002