Theatre in Review: Satchmo at the Waldorf (Westside Theatre)

	John Douglas Thompson. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Solo biography shows rarely get a performance as monumental as that currently being offered by John Douglas Thompson in Satchmo at the Waldorf, a new play about the last days of Louis Armstrong. But then the author, Terry Teachout, has ambitions that take this far beyond the conventions of the Dead Celebrity Playhouse genre. Usually in plays of this sort, the famous person spends an evening at home, talking to the fourth wall for no good reason, reliving the high and low moments of his or her career. Teachout, the author of a distinguished biography of Armstrong (and, more recently, Duke Ellington) has found a clever and dramatically effective way of transcending this clichéd concept. This is a one-person show, but it is driven by three very different characters.

The opening moments of Satchmo at the Waldorf make it clear that this will be no easy, sentimental tribute. We are in Armstrong's dressing room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in early 1971. As the lights come up, we hear applause offstage; the door opens and in comes Armstrong, staggering across the stage and clamping an oxygen mask onto his face. After he recovers his breath, he looks out at us and announces, "I shit myself tonight."

Seventy years old and worn out from years of hard living -- he often spent 300 nights a year on the road -- Armstrong is only a few months out from his positively final appearance. Playing the Waldorf against doctor's orders, he barely has the strength to get through a show, but he is determined to press on with his memoirs. Turning on an enormous reel-to-reel tape recorder, he is quick to remind us that the beloved national icon known as Satchmo has a quite a mouth on him. (A certain word beginning, but not ending, with "mother" is employed repeatedly.) He also has little use for the grinning, good-time entertainment icon he has become, what a newspaper calls "a walking Smithsonian Institution of Jazz." Instead, he tells us, "I come from Storyville, where all the whores live. Mayann, my mama? She was a whore. Everybody in the world know that, and it don't seem to stop 'em from coming to see me."

The rest of the story is hardly more edifying. Sent to live in New Orleans' Colored Waif's Home for Boys, he learns to play the cornet. In his early 20s, he moves to Chicago, where, before long, he becomes entangled with Al Capone and Dutch Schultz, each of whom more or less wants to own him. Offering a way out of this tangle is Joe Glaser, who eventually became Armstrong's manager, and, quite possibly, the most important person in his life.

Thompson, who easily captures Armstrong's late-in-life frailty and his self-described "sawmill voice," transforms himself instantaneously into Glaser, a hard-driving Chicago entrepreneur with ramrod-straight posture and machine-gun vocal delivery, peppering his commentary with threats and obscenities in equal measure and freely admitting that he worships power at all costs. Nothing is sacred to him, not even his own Jewish heritage. Recalling his days of touring with Armstrong in the South, he notes the difficulty in finding a place where blacks could be served food. "Used to go into restaurants and carry food back to the bus in paper bags 'cause they wouldn't serve coloreds inside," he says. "They'd serve a Jew before they'd serve a colored. Shitheads."

In many ways, Armstrong and Glaser prove to be an ideal match. Armstrong, who lives only for his music, is more than happy to cede control of everything else -- bookings, the band's payroll, you name it -- to Glaser, who uses the gig to build Associated Booking, Incorporated, his own entertainment empire. Glaser becomes a kind of professional friend, touring with Armstrong and taking his long, late-night phone calls when not on the road with him. Their relationship takes on certain plantation overtones -- Armstrong always refers to Glaser as "Mr. Glaser" and "the boss man," while Glaser always calls him "Louie." Glaser proceeds to repackage Armstrong as a mass audience item, playing down his virtuoso trumpet technique in favor of his sunny stage persona and distinctive pop vocals, partnering him with the likes of Bing Crosby in Hollywood films. Glaser's biggest coup is to get Armstrong to record "Hello, Dolly!" right after the show opens on Broadway; in a hilariously candid passage, Armstrong makes fun of Jerry Herman's melody and lyrics while noting with no small satisfaction how he rode the song to the top of the pop charts, leaving the Beatles in the dust.

By this point, Armstrong has permanently raised the hackles of a younger generation of black musicians, specialists in rhythm and blues or bebop who have little use for his old-fashioned musical style and his unthreatening, audience-pleasing manner. In the evening's third remarkable characterization, Thompson also plays Miles Davis, who, without raising his voice, makes scaldingly clear his distaste for all that Armstrong represents. Armstrong bitterly notes that Davis says, "I jump around and grin for the white folks. Now what the f--- is that supposed to mean? I'm tomming 'cause I go out on stage and make people happy?" But even he has to admit that there isn't one black face in the audience at the Waldorf.

Satchmo at the Waldorf is plenty interesting when functioning as a kind of three-way debate about the changing roles of black entertainers in the 20th century, but Teachout ups the ante with a bombshell revelation -- not to be revealed here -- following Glaser's death in 1970, which leaves Armstrong feeling deeply betrayed. Because we have been privy to Glaser's account, we know that there is much more to the story, reaching back four decades to the time when Glaser extricated Armstrong from the grip of his gangster patrons. Thompson has many fine moments, but none is more gripping than when the mask slips and he unburdens himself of a lifetime's worth of suppressed fury at his onetime mentor and friend. Thompson is equally persuasive as Glaser, ramming home his points with the mechanical inevitability of an adding machine, and as Davis, so studied in his cool, offering one passive-aggressive dig after another. But his Armstrong is a multifaceted wonder, failing physically yet possessed of a sly humor and an extraordinary trove of memories to share.

In addition to helping to shape Thompson's remarkable three-way performance, the director, Gordon Edelstein, has seen to it that Satchmo at the Waldorf has an evocative production design that supports the script's tripartite nature. Lee Savage's beautifully detailed dressing room set, aided by Kevin Adams' meticulous lighting, has a different look for each character. When Glaser is speaking, the vanity mirrors on the wall become windows through which we see a Chicago street. When Davis takes over, the lighting adopts a dark, supersaturated look, like a nightclub at 3am. John Gromada's sound design includes some tasty selections by Armstrong before and during the show. Ilona Somogyi's costume design helps create the illusion that Thompson is the septuagenarian Armstrong.

Satchmo at the Waldorf ends gracefully, with Armstrong unbowed by the depredations of age and illness, determined, despite his personal disappointments, not to go gentle into that good night. Most of John Douglas Thompson's performances in New York have been in classical roles; here is proof that he is just as fine playing a relatively contemporary personality. Then again, Armstrong has handed him a character of almost Shakespearean complexity; rest assured, he certainly knows what to do with it.--David Barbour