A Valentine to Elaine Stritch on her 85th birthday
When Elaine Stritch did her autobiographical solo on Broadway in 2002, she nightly made 1,300 theatergoers feel we somehow had been invited to an exclusive, intimate dinner party that happened to have a band in the pit.
On Tuesday, fewer than 100 people were able to squeeze into a genuine intimate party - her 85th birthday at the Café Carlyle, the cabaret / supper club in the serenely posh part of Madison Avenue. Stephen Sondheim was there, sitting not far from Patti LuPone and Nathan Lane and Liz Smith and unidentifiable people who could afford not to ask the prices.
For all the boldface clatter, however, the force onstage was much the same riveting creature who had held forth in her Tony-winning show and Emmy-winning HBO special, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty." She wore a kicky little black skirt above the skinniest legs this side of an aviary, and she carried the perfect emotional pitch that continues to catapult her into the most thrilling kind of theater history.
It was probably not, strictly speaking, the performance she wanted to give on this one-night birthday extension of "Elaine Stritch Singin' Sondheim . . . One Song at a Time." The singing actress always has been brutally honest, about herself and everyone else. (Who else could get an Emmy for playing Alec Baldwin's mother on "30 Rock" by being more ornery than her son?)
So after the first few memory blips - glitches common in these casual settings by artists of any age - she began to get angry with herself. "I am not going to give any excuses," she said, flashing her don't-mess-with-me defiance. At the close of the evening, she confided to the crowd that she had "woken up in the middle of a hypo," by which she meant a state of low blood glucose related to her years of severe diabetes.
This did not put a crimp in the circulating birthday cake. More to the point, it hardly put a flinch in the astonishing aplomb that has always suspended her deep-dish musical and personal revelations.
She began with a wink and "I Feel Pretty," leaning ever-so slightly into "it's alarming how charming I feel." She paused, with her comic mouth and her serious eyes, to share the almost incredulous pleasure of being "such a pretty me!"
As anyone knows who saw her in Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" in 1996, she is as disciplined and as outrageous in plays as in musicals. She never learned to have a country-club face, the female smile that hides the effects of life on her skin. She dangles those legs around like a woman who remembers what it meant to get a charge out of adolescence.
She finds her own home in the songs - each one a play in itself - of Sondheim, who turns 80 on March 22 and whom she pretty adorably calls Mr. Sondheim. She launched into a scarily subdued yet voracious and unsentimental "Rose's Turn" from "Gypsy" - but not before muttering "Why the hell not?" about a role she never had but one she clearly could have eaten with a spoon.
Because her stage performances have always implied at least as complicated and beguiling an interior life, we trusted her to bother with yet another "Send in the Clowns." When she got to "losing my timing this late in my career," she need not have worried.
The timing and rhythm are still elastic, still impeccable. Even when talk-singing a melody, she picks out the dead center of each note without a quaver. Each phrase is intimate with the words, each pause knows the meaning in silence. In "At Liberty," she talked about doing comedy sketches in a Broadway revue. She told her young self, " 'Well, you've got to be real to be really funny.' So Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekhov were paying off."
On Tuesday, surrounded by more musicians than we get lately in Sondheim revivals on Broadway, she wanted to recite just the lines, without music, to "Every Day a Little Death," the devastating song in "A Little Night Music." She kept losing her place, then diving back in. "I dig this song!," she said furiously. "You are all gonna hear it right, goddamnit!" And so we did.
And we got "The Ladies Who Lunch," her singular trademark from "Company," with all the sophisticated, witty, clear-eyed devastations that everyone who has come later has only been able to imitate. "Ohboyohboyohboyohboy," she said. "What a time I have had! And I'm not complaining. I am bragging!"
She had been scheduled to end her acclaimed monthlong engagement last Sunday, to be followed by several weeks of Christine Ebersole. But someone brilliant decided to keep the birthday girl for an extra show in her occasional series, called "Elaine Stritch at Home at The Carlyle" - because, after all, she does live right upstairs in the hotel. More was added after the birthday: three Mondays, March 22, 29 and April 5, then performances from April 20 to May 1.
In a season offering her plus the other authentic Sondheim women - Barbara Cook (the upcoming "Sondheim on Sondheim") and Angela Lansbury ("A Little Night Music") - it's a happy birthday for us all. But someone should remind Stritch that, at 76, she said she wanted to do a sequel to "At Liberty" in 10 years. After all, as the song says, "Well, maybe next year."
