Also this issue:

Three Sisters
Theatre Exile presents a world premiere that’s a real family affair.
-Deni Kasrel

Remembering Ella
Local artists react to the death of Ella King Torrey
-David Warner

Gentlemen Volunteers
-Juliet Fletcher

Philadanco
-Janet Anderson

Project Room Benefit Party
-Debra Auspitz

Rennie Harris Puremovement at Salute to Youth
-Deni Kasrel

Stango Gallery opening
-Debra Auspitz

ArtsQuicks
More stuff going on this week …

May 8-14, 2003

art

Still Here

Lady elaine: Stritch tells all in her one-woman show.

Elaine Stritch (still) isn’t afraid to speak her mind.

by A.D. Amorosi

Words like "candid" or "frank" don’t quite suit the attitude that Elaine Stritch brings to the table, in person and in her powerful one-woman mega-monologue, Elaine Stritch At Liberty. The word "fuck" pretty much sums it up.

"That fucking Tony," she says of the award she won for At Liberty last year. "I don't even know where the fucking Tony is. They sent it to the Carlyle. I told the manager if they find it, put it in the fucking lobby with a plaque [that says] ŒElaine Stritch slept here.'

"Why am I saying Œfuck' so much?" she asks, laughing.

Because she can. And she can do a whole lot more, as she demonstrates in At Liberty.

Her story is simple: Painfully insecure woman lives a larger-than-life life on and off stage. She drinks. A lot. So much so that she earmarks moments by favored cocktails. She has affairs, great and lousy. She takes on the greatest plays -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bus Stop.

"I did musicals as strongly as I did dramas. No big switch. A straight play is like flying British Airways. A musical is flying the Concorde," she says.

A harsh perfectionist with a signature death-rattle voice, Stritch was branded as difficult early on. Though she lost out on some opportunities (pal Jackie Gleason turned Stritch down for The Honeymooners for being too funny), Stritch made her mark on theater legends like Stephen Sondheim and Noel Coward, creating the definitive takes on some of their classics (like her viciously sarcastic "The Ladies Who Lunch").

"Having his approval will keep you on the straight and narrow for two or three years. He's manna from heaven. Evian in the desert," Stritch says of Sondheim. "I appreciate where Stephen's coming from. I didn't understand ŒLadies Who Lunch' when I first sang it. Thought Mahler was a pastry shop. I was scared shitless of him."

Stritch never had high self-esteem -- "which is a shame, because I should and I don't" -- but she rarely allowed that to be detrimental to her career. She broke through. Accepted challenges. And, she admits, "I used a little Tanqueray to make it happen."

Quitting drinking -- a fixture in Stritch's life for over 50 years -- was the hardest thing she's done, she says. That and overcoming the initial horror of getting on stage in the first place. "The first time I was asked why I went on stage I gave a martini answer -- to get a good table. The better answer [is] -- to get out of the audience." She got over her insecurity with the booze, but says she needed to know if she was really talented, without the bottle. So she got sober. "On my own. It worked. But it's a hard-knock life being sober."

Reality is what Stritch brings to the stage. "The stories are in the telling, you know," she says. Those stories were shaped by author and critic John Lahr, the son of stage legend Bert Lahr. "Lahr gave me so many metaphors to what my life is all about. I wanted to kill him. But he told me the madder I got the better it was," Stritch says. Living it was no emotional roller coaster, she adds, but writing it, making it entertaining, was. "Fear of failure? I'm not doing a show tonight and I'm afraid."

At Liberty is brutal, fearful, honest and hilarious, with Stritch ripping through tales of boozing, boys and Broadway while singing career-making songs like "Civilization" and "I'm Still Here." And, Stritch adds, Liberty is not career-defining. Or ending. She still has plans: She wants to work with George Wolfe or Hal Prince on a straight play. A new one, preferably. "I'm waiting for my phone call."

Elaine Stritch At Liberty, May 13-18, $25-$65, The Academy of Music, Broad and Locust sts., 215-893-1999.