[Dixielandjazz] Satchmo at the Waldorf reviewed - New Jersey Newsroom, March 6, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

Well, Hello Louis...
by Michael Sommers
New Jersey Newsroom, March 6, 2014
Louis Armstrong, that jazzy American entertainer with the trumpet and gravelly voice,
left the planet in 1971 but his recordings remain distinctively charming. A new play,
"Satchmo at the Waldorf," reveals something of the raffish side of his life and times.
Currently running at the Westside Theater/Upstairs, this 90-minute show is a one-man
drama in which John Douglas Thompson brings Armstrong to warm, salty life. Not at
all a musical, although Armstrong's music is heard now and again on tape, Terry Teachout's
play occurs in 1971 in a dressing room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the ailing
musician has just finished a performance.
It is obvious from the get-go that this show will not be a mellow heart-and-flowers
tribute to a legend as Armstrong painfully staggers into the room, gasps some air
from an oxygen tank and announces that he soiled himself. Slowly recovering his energy,
Armstrong candidly chats to the audience as if they were in the room with him. Declaring
that his only desires were to make music and entertain people, Armstrong is irked
that some African-Americans dismiss him as an Uncle Tom figure rather than as an
artist who broke through the color line.
While he slowly dresses himself and lovingly cleans out his horn, Armstrong talks
of his hardscrabble youth picking through garbage in Storyville, his early times
in reform school and his misadventures as a rising performer in mobbed-up nightclubs
of the 1920s. Tops among Armstrong's later-life anecdotes is the funny story of how
he came to record "Hello, Dolly!" -- a song that he didn't much like -- and how its
unexpected chart-busting success caught him so much by surprise one night that he
couldn't remember how the number went.
Armstrong also ruefully reflects upon his longtime association with Joe Glaser, his
ballsy manager who bailed him out of jams and allowed him to concentrate on his music.
Intermittently, with a change of lighting and a neat trick with mirrors by set designer
Lee Savage, Thompson also assumes Glaser's fast-talking identity to provide the pugnacious
manager's perspective on the relationship, which ended on a bitter note.
The frequent shifts in time and place in Armstrong's narrative are smoothly managed
by director Gordon Edelstein's production. Designer Kevin Adams' lighting assists
with the show's transitions and provides a generally sundown mood around a man looking
back upon his life. A vital, magnetic actor usually seen in classical roles, Thompson
wonderfully embodies Armstrong's physical frailties, rasping voice and more often
than not genial disposition.
-30


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

“I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.” -Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952.