Sunday, July 20, 2014

Elaine Stritch: Elaine Stritch At Liberty (2002)

 

elaine

The legendary Tony and Emmy winner Elaine Stritch talks about her audition for the role of Dorothy in a classic hit CBS show The Golden Girls. The role, of course, went to Bea Arthur.

Veteran actress/singer Elaine Stritch had a career in musicals, straight plays, movies, and TV dating back to the mid-’40s, and at age 76 she reviews it all on this two-CD album, which is a recorded version of her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. Her singing voice has long since become raspy and limited, but her timing and phrasing enable her to put across almost any song effectively.

She features her signature songs, from “Civilization” (the novelty in which a monkey expresses a preference for the jungle), which she sang in her first Broadway show, Angel in the Wings, in 1947, to Noël Coward’s witty “Why Do the Wrong People Travel,” which she introduced in Sail Away in 1961, and, inevitably, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” her showstopper from Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1970. Other songs tend to be incidental to the anecdotes she tells, starting with an annotated version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” from which she hangs a series of humorous personal observations. Stritch is unsparing to herself as well as her colleagues, providing an impressionistic autobiography that is revealing, if selective. You would hardly know about her extensive work in television, which goes almost unmentioned, but her major theatre credits are all touched on. She is unafraid to discuss her problems with alcohol or with men. Containing entertaining stories concerning such figures as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ethel Merman, and Noël Coward, this is an album that will delight anyone interested in the history of theatre over the years from the 1940s to the 1980s, as told from the vantage point of one of its more acute, if occasionally addlepated, observers. And though the mere listener is denied the added pleasure of having Stritch on-stage performing it, very little is actually lost in the transfer to disc.

Recorded live at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre, New York, New York on January 10-12, 2002.

Track Listing:

1. There’s No Business Like Show Business (Berlin)
2. Caca
3. I Want a Long Time Daddy (Grainger)
4. A Piece of Mahler
5. This Is All Very New to Me (Hague/Horwitt)
6. Going to New York
7. Marlon Brando
8. Broadway Baby (Sondheim)
9. My First Broadway Show
10. Civilization (Hilliard/Sigman)
11. Ethel Merman
12. Can You Use Any Money Today? (Berlin)
13. Pal Joey
14. Zip (Hart/Rodgers)
15. Ben Gazzara
16. Nokl Coward
17. Why Do the Wrong People Travel (Coward)
18. Richard Burton
19. But Not for Me/If Love Were All (Gershwin/Gershwin)
20. I’m Still Here (Sondheim)
21. Booze
22. Little Things You Do Together (Sondheim)
23. The Ladies Who Lunch (Sondheim)
24. John Bay
25. There Was Never a Baby Like My Baby (Comden/Green/Styne)
26. I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party (Coward)
27. God So Quickly
28. The Party’s Over (Comden/Green/Styne)
29. Absent Almost Always
30. Something Good (Rodgers)

DVD

CD

Elaine Stritch: Ladies Who Lunch (Company)

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