[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday in plays - New York Times, April 20, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

The Personification of Legends
by Nate Chinen
New York Times, April 20, 2014
Louis Armstrong, who always knew how to make an entrance, gets a doozy of an opening
scene in "Satchmo at the Waldorf," a one-man show now playing at the Westside Theater.
It's March 1971 and dark as night in the trumpeter and singer's dressing room at
the Waldorf-Astoria, except for a Hopperesque shaft of light streaming through the
door. A muffled ovation rises and falls in the distance, and then in he comes, lurching
wheezily toward an oxygen tank across the room.
Armstrong's first line, after he has gathered his breath and flicked on the lights,
is a blunt, unprintable admission about an accident he'd had in the hotel elevator
before that evening's show. "Seventy years old," he says a few beats later, with
disgust and disbelief, "and here I am, messing myself at the Waldorf. Just like a
baby."
There's a loosely analogous story in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," which
opened on Broadway last week at Circle in the Square. Here the jazz legend is Billie
Holiday, the date is March 1959 and the setting is a neighborhood club in South Philadelphia.
Evidently in bad shape, well into a bottle of gin, Holiday reaches back some 20 years
to recall a standoff in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant in the Deep South. After
being barred from using the bathroom by a white female maître d'hôtel, Holiday says,
she took the appropriate revenge, letting loose and soaking the horrified woman's
sequined heels.
Each of these tragicomic scenes plays out as an eruption of vulgarity in a setting
of exclusionary civility. What gives them an added jolt is the tension between Armstrong
and Holiday's legacies -- in word and image as well as music -- and the imagined
frailty of their physical presence. The underlying theme is control, and the struggle
to maintain even a piece of it. As it turns out, that struggle courses throughout
both plays, inextricable at every turn from the subject of race.
It's pure coincidence that the current theater season includes these two autumnal
portraits of jazz royalty, each embodied by a performer of indomitable skill. "Satchmo
at the Waldorf," by Terry Teachout, is a showcase for the acclaimed classical actor
John Douglas Thompson; "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," by Lanie Robertson,
is a vehicle for the five-time Tony-winning actress and singer Audra McDonald. Both
productions mingle historical fact with dramatic license, puncturing some myths and
perpetuating others. What neither can quite account for is the extent to which Holiday
and Armstrong constructed their public images, complicating countless attempts at
portrayal, including some in which they were complicit.
"Satchmo," which grew out of Mr. Teachout's diligent 2009 biography "Pops," is more
satisfying on that point. The popular Armstrong persona -- folksy and upbeat, aglow
with generosity and mischief -- becomes just one dimension of a character who also
nurses grudges, seethes at slights and issues prideful justifications. He's also
self-aware, up to a point.
"I'm just an old ham actor: Blow a tune, tell a joke," he says with a sly self-effacement.
"I'm there in the cause of happiness."
Armstrong was an inveterate letter writer and self-chronicler, as any visit to the
Louis Armstrong House Museum, in Corona, Queens, can confirm. Mr. Teachout, having
waded through the field with a scavenger's eye, finds ample fodder, as well as a
framing device: Armstrong's habit of recording his reminiscences on a reel-to-reel
tape machine.
At the time of the Waldorf-Astoria engagement, a few months before he died of a heart
attack, Armstrong's celebrity was roughly inverse to his critical estimation. He
was considered a relic by many African-Americans, particularly those who saw in his
performance style a vestige of black subservience; Miles Davis briefly materializes
in "Satchmo" to personify this point of view. Because it's refuted elsewhere in the
play, Davis comes off as a Black Power cliché, though that's neither the fault of
the director, Gordon Edelstein, nor Mr. Thompson, who delineates the characters in
clean strokes.
Mr. Thompson also plays Armstrong's white manager, Joe Glaser, toggling between the
two. Blustery, coarse and effective, Glaser was the heavy in all of Armstrong's business
dealings; he was also, by the trumpeter's steadfast account, a paternalistic and
trusted friend. The sting of betrayal that Armstrong felt after Glaser's death in
1969, when he learned that he hadn't been left a percentage of Associated Booking,
the business they effectively both built, provides the central dramatic conflict
in "Satchmo," punched up by a mob subplot that, in a leap of supposition, ends up
rationalizing Glaser's motives.
The play does better with this drama than with any musical analysis of Armstrong's
genius. The closest that "Satchmo" comes is a moment in which the trumpeter plays
a recording of his thrilling fanfare in "West End Blues," from 1928. "Don't that
sound like the fat lady singin'?" he says, chuckling, after mentioning Caruso. "I
ain't no ignorant hick."
But when he later describes musical expression as an essential outpouring of the
self -- "What you hear come out a man's horn, that's what he is" -- it stirs up a
pernicious stereotype about the "natural" talent of Negro musicians. The line is
attributable to Armstrong, and in keeping with his tendency to appraise music in
terms of feeling. But plucked out of context, it resonates as an uncomplicated reality,
which could hardly have been the case.
"Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," which had a successful run Off Broadway in
1986, leaves no wiggle room on the subject of natural talent: "Ever' damn body can
sing," Holiday recalls telling a club owner early in her career, oblivious to the
rarity of her gift. That she is played in this case by Ms. McDonald -- who sings
a set's worth of songs with virtuoso attunement to every catch and curl in Holiday's
vocal playbook -- makes the idea seem credible at a glance, yet all the more preposterous
on further reflection.
The primary source for "Lady Day at Emerson's" seems to have been Holiday's autobiography,
"Lady Sings the Blues." (It was also the basis for the 1972 film of the same name,
starring Diana Ross.) Pieced together by William Dufty and published in 1956, that
book has long been recognized as the product of an agenda, driven by tabloid sensibilities
and a bid for sympathy. Its fabrications and half-truths begin with the first two
sentences, about the ages and marital status of Holiday's parents at her birth, recirculated
in Mr. Robertson's play as fact.
Structurally, the play mirrors a concert that Holiday performed late in '56 at Carnegie
Hall, partly to promote the book and partly because she was still unable to work
in clubs, because of a conviction for drug possession and the loss of her cabaret
card. Recorded and later released as an album, the concert interspersed her best-loved
songs with excerpts read, in a dry deadpan, by the critic Gilbert Millstein.
The chief dramatic contrivance is that Holiday narrates her own autobiographical
asides to the audience at Emerson's -- which in this production, directed by Lonny
Price, consists of premium ticket holders seated at tables. Sometimes she's nudged
reluctantly into a song by her pianist, whom she blearily mistakes for her first
husband, Jimmy Monroe, known as Sonny, who was purported to have introduced her to
heroin.
Over the last 25 years, a body of scholarship has taken up Holiday's slippery image
as a useful challenge. In the 1991 book "Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday,"
Robert O'Meally makes the point that "Holiday's life was an audacious self-invention
by a person who figured out very early that she was born into a situation of comprehensive
powerlessness."
Farah Jasmine Griffin, in her 2001 book "In Search of Billie Holiday: If You Can't
Be Free, Be a Mystery," further considers the ways that Holiday tailored her message
to a situation -- telling the respectable middle-class readers of Ebony magazine,
for instance, that all she longed for was a quiet home and the joys of motherhood.
Statements like these surface uncritically in "Lady Day at Emerson's," no more carefully
examined than the indelible images that lend the play its look and style.
The final scene has Holiday singing "Deep Song," and gradually falling mute, still
mouthing the lyrics: "I only know misery has to be a part of me." In this production,
the music swells behind her silence, and she freezes in a pose familiar from photographs.
The stage goes dark, and when the lights rise, there's a projection of Holiday's
signature gardenia on the wall behind the stage, as if to say the iconography is
all we have.
As it happens, Mr. Teachout owes much of "Satchmo" to a photograph by Eddie Adams,
taken nine months before Armstrong's death. "He's sitting in a chair, looking very
old and very tired," Mr. Teachout recently said in an interview with the pianist
Ethan Iverson, on his blog, Do the Math. "That picture insinuated itself into my
consciousness, and the first line in the play came to me." The power of that image
was a spark more effective even than the music.
In the play's final scene, Mr. Thompson's Armstrong gathers his things and bids good
night, pledging to soldier on again tomorrow. Then he shuffles out the dressing-room
door into the light -- like Ms. McDonald's Holiday, a figure at once illuminated
and all but unknowable.
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

First you forget names,
then you forget faces.
Then you forget to pull up your zipper...
it's worse when you forget to pull it down.