Word: stritch
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...Balcony, which opened last season and is still running--so make that six!) seems a lazy way of making rich subject matter easy to digest--and almost guaranteeing a Tony acting nod in the bargain. Then there are the autobiographical shows, which can occasionally be dishy and inspired (Elaine Stritch at Liberty) but just as often superfluous ego trips (Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends). The real growth industry in the past few years, however, has been the puffed-up comedy monologue, from the traditional stand-up of comics like Jackie Mason, Bill Maher and Rob Becker (Defending...
Even if Elaine Stritch had not set a new standard for the one-woman stage memoir, Arthur's look back at her career would be a lame specimen of the genre. Instead of a freestyle skate, Arthur settles for the compulsory short program: a once-over-lightly reprise of her hits from stage (Fiddler on the Roof, Mame) and TV (Maude, The Golden Girls); a funny anecdote about each of the famous people she's worked with (Lotte Lenya, Tallulah Bankhead); and stilted "extemporaneous" banter with her pianist, Billy Goldenberg. The audience leaves to the accompaniment of the theme song...
...ELAINE STRITCH AT LIBERTY Do we really need another one-woman show in which a crusty Broadway trouper recounts her show-biz war stories while belting out Sondheim and Berlin standards? Yes, if she has enlisted as artful a collaborator as New Yorker theater critic John Lahr and can still perform, at age 76, with as much energy, wit and seen-it-all gumption as Elaine Stritch...
...centennial has spawned revivals and observances. In London there have been productions of three of his plays. New York City has seen a sprightly all-Coward revue featuring Twiggy and a terrific concert version of Sail Away, starring Elaine Stritch in the role she created in 1961. On Dec. 16 (Coward's birthday), Lauren Bacall opens in Waiting in the Wings; late winter will bring Suite in Two Keys, starring Keir Dullea (pretty creative casting, given Coward's famous 1965 dismissal of the actor: "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow...
Thus is he damned by his own gifts. On the closing night of Sail Away's limited run last month, Stritch told the audience about a conversation from the early '60s. "I asked Noel if he was afraid of death," Stritch recalled, "and he said the only thing he feared was that he wouldn't be remembered." It is his oceanic talent--the range of skills that made him seem, so inaccurately, a dilettante--that has brought Coward's fear to the brink of sad, sad fact...