Theatre in Review: Pat Kirkwood is Angry (59E59/Brits Off Broadway Festival)

	Photo: Carol Rosegg

Pat Kirkwood had plenty of reason to be angry: In 1948, while performing at the London Hippodrome, she accepted an invitation to have dinner with the Duke of Edinburgh in a Mayfair restaurant. This was not the done thing, to say the least; the idea of royalty consorting with stage stars was a throwback to the days of Edward VII and Lillie Langtry. In any event, it appears to have been little more than a long night of dinner and dancing that ended with breakfast the next morning. But the taint of scandal stuck to Kirkwood for the remainder of her life. As late as 1994, she was still trying to get Buckingham Palace to clear her name.

As Jessica Walker reveals in her one-woman show, Kirkwood had much more to fuel her anger, including an unloving mother, several busted marriages, a good husband who died too soon, a litany of bad career decisions, and a long retirement marked by boredom and mental decline. It's not a pretty story and Walker does nothing to dress it up. Instead, she delivers the painful facts, plainly and without anesthetic, while offering a program of songs associated with the star.

Kirkwood never had much of a profile here, and a fair amount of Walker's text, which is peppered with the names of long-gone British theatre personalities such as Max Wall, George Formby, and Evelyn Laye, will mean little or nothing to American audiences. As a result, her catty comments about them -- not to mention the likes of Julie Andrews, Van Johnson, and Keenan Wynn -- never land any laughs. (A particular bête noire is the actress June Whitfield, who, Walker goes out of her way to remind us, late in life played Jennifer Saunders' mother in the television series Absolutely Fabulous.) Without the relief of humor, Pat Kirkwood is Angry becomes a high-concept cabaret act driven by bitterness and informed with a touch of menace.

But Walker, a powerful soprano with a commanding stage presence and a piercing intelligence, rivets one's attention with the right material. (She also gets stellar support from her musical director, Joseph Atkins.) The numbers from Kirkwood's early career, bits of folderol like "Save a Little Sunshine," "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!," and "Crash! Bang! I Want to Go Home" are fun to listen to, but they can barely stand up to the star's intense delivery; she practically wrestles them to a standstill. She comes into her own, however, with a lovely Noël Coward rarity, "My Kind of Man." ("He may be a copper's narc/A city clerk/Or even a gigolo/But when we meet I'll never let him go.") And she uses "Love on a Greyhound Bus," a jaunty Georgie Stoll-Ralph Blane-Kay Thompson bit of special material, to supremely ironic effect, weaving it around her big Hollywood misadventure, which resulted in one flop film, an asylum stay, and electroshock treatment thanks to a course of thyroid medicine administered by M-G-M doctors. (Louis B. Mayer felt she was overweight.)

From then on, everything is pretty much golden. She complains that her one Coward vehicle, Ace of Clubs, was second-rate; the show was a flop, but anything that contains the crisply amusing "Josephine" ("The people who thought her technique was self-taught/Didn't know Josephine") and the classic "Sail Away" is all right by me. She turns "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" into a comment on a husband's infidelity, turning Lorenz Hart's wry lyrics into a furious, defiant statement of acceptance of another's frailties. (There's something particularly provocative about the way she caresses the words "And worship the trousers that cling to him;" she makes it into a statement of more than one kind of surrender.) She makes the most of "Guess Who I Saw Today?," that one-act play in song from New Faces of 1952 about a marriage in distress. And she brings it all home with a version of "For All We Know" that sums up a life that went by too fast, providing too few satisfactions.

It's putting it mildly to call Walker an unorthodox performer; with this show and The Girl I Left Behind Me, her tribute to male impersonators of the English music hall, seen last season at 59E59, she is something of an historian of popular song, preserving the lives of female performers who might otherwise be forgotten. She is also supremely honest, even if the results can sometimes be discomfiting. In format, Pat Kirkwood is Angry recalls Love, Linda, the solo piece about Mrs. Cole Porter seen at the York in December. But that show employed a tone of lightly sophisticated regret to tell its sad story; Walker stares unblinkingly into the darkness at the core of Kirkwood's life. And despite Kirkwood's protestations that the audience was her one true love, the show has none of the warmth and affection for the world of English music hall to be found in the currently running Just Jim Dale.

Still, if Pat Kirkwood is angry, she is never dull, not even for a minute, and Walker's show casts a fascinating light on an underappreciated talent. Jessica Walker may be an acquired taste, but she is definitely worth a try.--David Barbour