Satchmo
at the Waldorf
Terry Teachout
 |
| John Douglas Thompson as Louis Armstrong |
Our first glimpse of him is not what we remember
from those bigger-than-life pictures of his sparkling eyes shining through
squinted slots, huge smile of ivories that became his trademark, and rounded
face always aimed upwards ready to rasp out a familiar tune we so loved. Across the massive dressing room stumbles a
hunched-over, old man clearly exhausted and suffering from arthritic pain. After tumbling onto an over-sized divan and
taking a few whiffs from a near-by oxygen tank, his first words to us are, “I
shit in myself tonight ... I ain’t kidding you folks at all.” Like most elderly folks, he must first tell
us how his “heart’s gone bad, kidneys shut down” before he can get on to the
business of the evening – sharing with us, his mostly white audience and thus most
probably true fans and friends, the story of his long life of joys and
injustices. Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf, superbly
presented by the American Conservatory Theatre, takes us behind the scenes
following one of the last performances of the famed trumpeter and singer, Louis
‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. First-hand, we hear
of a complicated life that began in 1901 among whores in New Orleans, that
skirted dangerously with the likes of Chicago gangsters Al Capone and Dutch
Schultz, that filled the stages of both Southern dives and New York monolith
hotels, and that overtime disgusted young African-American jazz artists who
followed in his musical pioneering footsteps.
With the familiar gravely voice, tendencies to stutter
the first words of his sentence (“Bu, Bu, But” or “An, An, And”), and a smile
that shines forth in quarter-moon fashion even as he chatters away, John
Douglas Thompson quickly establishes that he is the great Louie so many in the
audience remember – even if the stooped, hobbling man before us is only a
shadow of the man we once saw on TV and movie screen. He begins by shaking us up a bit with facts
we may not have known (“I had me four wives, a whore, a piano player, and two
chorus girls”) but quickly moves to more personally serious topics to tell us
his side of the forty-year relationship with his manager, “my boss and my
friend, Mr. Glaser,” as well as his rebuttals to the likes of Miles Davis and Dizzy
Gillespie “who treat me like shit.”
To the former, he entrusted on an initial
hand-shake a lifetime of managing his career and finances so that he could do
what he did best: “I’m just an old ham actor ... in the cause of
happiness.” Over and again, Louis tells
us in one breath how much he misses his one-time friend and manager, now dead
two years; and in the next he bitterly calls him a “mother-fucker” for a
perceived breach of that first, spoken contract between them.
Of the young jazz greats who have turned their
backs on him, he is both bitter and mystified.
Shaking his head and swearing a streak of four-letter epitaphs, Louis
(“not Louie”) does not understand how they cannot see that “swinging and
singing are the two biggest things I did for jazz” and why they now think of
him as an “Uncle Tom” because most of his audiences “look like a carton of eggs
sitting out there.”
Mr. Thompson’s Louis is clearly proud of his
lifetime of achievements, none more that seeing himself for the first time in a
Loony Tunes cartoon as a trumpet-playing angel. “Can’t get any more famous than
that,” he boasts in the biggest of smiles and sparkles. He is also deeply in love with his fourth
wife of thirty years, Lucille, as we see in one of the more tender moments of
the evening as our Louis tells with eyes near tears how his young wife made
sure he had a decorated tree waiting for him in their hotel room after a
Christmas Eve show, the first he had ever had in his life. Mr. Thompson is masterful in baring all sides
of Louis Armstrong’s huge personality in authentic and believable fashion, all
the time reminding us as he gingerly undresses his tux to his underwear and
redresses to go upstairs in the hotel to his wife that he is old and tired,
satisfied and frustrated, willing to die soon but eager still to keep living.
 |
| John Douglas Thompson as Miles Davis |
What makes a good telling of the Armstrong saga all
the more great are the split-second switches our one-man show does to become
Glaser and Miles Davis. In a blink of
the eye, time and again our Louis goes from a limping, crumpled old man to a
six-foot-plus giant who has both business man and Chicago mob written all over
him. His Glaser tells us in a
back-of-throat echo, “I am Louie, Louis is me ... To me, he is like a son.” Glaser gets ample stage time to parallel
Louis’s life’s accounting, adding in his version of the details -- like how he had to carry into their tour bus
food in paper bags for Louie when they were in the South because the whites who
flocked to his shows would not let him come into their restaurants. As Glaser, John Douglas Thompson unveils a
different tale from Louis’s, one also full of anguish as well as satisfaction
with the way things played out between them and one that makes our hearing
Louis’s anger over perceived breach of trust even more sad.
When turning into the young Miles Davis, no less
remarkable transformation occurs by Mr. Thompson. The soft, breathy Davis
admonishes his sometime hero for just wanting “to make all those white folks
happy ... like some old-time darky.” In
exasperation, he asks us, “Why can’t he wipe that grin off his face?” -- the very grin most of us in the audience still
adore seeing.
If there is any slight disappointment in Mr.
Teachout’s script or Mr. Thompson’s depiction of Louis Armstrong, it is that
while we hear over and again as he caresses and cleans his horn, “My life, my
soul, my everything came out of this trumpet” and as he tells us, “When I sing,
I smile,” we get to hear almost no music in this ninety minute tour de force. Probably everyone arrives expecting this to
be a mixture of his singing and playing the trumpet; and we just have to
readjust our incoming outlook as we clearly enjoy the fantastic, highly
entertaining show we get instead (as witnessed by the instantaneous standing
ovation in the end).
Gordon Edelstein has directed a flow of stories
and characters that never misses a beat, neither too fast nor too slow. Set in the kind of magnificent dressing room
one might expect of the famed Waldorf Astoria, the play quickly announces when
Glaser or Gillespie have taken over Armstrong’s body by wonderful reflections
of other scenes in Set Designer Lee Savage’s plateau of mirrors across the back
wall. Kevin Adams’ lighting design also
accentuates beautifully the changes of mood and scene that quickly occur
throughout.
American Conservatory Theatre presents a gift to
its San Francisco audience by bringing John Douglas Thompson and Terry
Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf to
the Geary Theatre. This is an
opportunity not to be missed.
Rating: 5
E
Satchmo
at the Waldorf continues through February 5, 2016, at
the Geary Theatre, 405 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at
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