Waiting With Vladimir And Estragon

And we are still waiting for Godot.  Now more than ever.  Samuel Beckett's masterpiece.  This is from the 1961 TV broadcast, starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel.  Waiting For Godot inspired many famous pairings in the two lead roles.  The Broadway premiere in 1956 featured Bert Lahr and EG Marshall.  Geoffrey Rush and Mel Gibson performed the roles in a 1979 Australian production, while Robin Williams and Steve Martin headlined a 1988 Broadway revival.  2009 saw a London production with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart while Nathan Lane and John Goodman starred in yet another Broadway revival.

And here is THC's own take on the play.

If I Were A Rich Man

Fiddler on the Roof had its Broadway opening on September 22, 1964 starring the incomparable Zero Mostel as Teyve the milkman in a play based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, set in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century.  Fiddler ran for a then-record 3,242 performances and Zero's performance set the template for every future Tevye.

For Mostel, Fiddler was his third, and biggest, theater success of the 1960's, beginning with Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play Rhinoceros in 1961, followed by A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962.  In a reversal of the plot surrounding Mostel's role as a failing Broadway producer in Mel Brooks' 1968 debut film, The Producers, investors in Fiddler made $1,574 for every dollar invested.

My parents took me to see Fiddler when Zero was still in it and I still remember the event (which I believe was mandatory for every Jewish family in the New York metropolitan area because so many of our families emigrated from that part of Russia amidst the turmoil of those times).  There is nothing on YouTube from the original Broadway cast but I found this from his appearance at the Tony Awards show in June 1965.  You can see for yourself what a force of nature Zero was onstage.  It's also the reason he was not cast in the film version of Fiddler.  The director felt that anytime Mostel was onscreen he would draw all the attention to himself to the detriment of the other performers.




Fiddler on the Roof continues to be performed around the world.  It is particularly popular in Japan which at first glance seems odd but the author of a recent article in Tablet explains:

Fiddler opens with a song celebrating tradition, but the bulk of the show is about the difficulty of maintaining those traditions—and, perhaps, the futility of trying—in the face of a modernizing culture. And it ends with the family, filled with a mix of hope and fear, taking off for whole new world(s) where the old rules don’t apply and the new rules, if there are any, are not yet clear.

So maybe Fiddler resonates in Tokyo not only because it’s a family drama about fathers and daughters, or a universal tale about modernity, but because Japanese history does, in fact, include a chapter about dislocation from a sepia-toned “old world” and an uncertain journey to a “new world” where the traditional rules no longer applied. Tevye and his daughters had to leave Anatevka and even move across an ocean to find their new world. The Japanese stayed put, but the new world came to them just as surely, with the same uncertain mix of hope and fear.

Satchmo At The Waldorf

We are looking at a dressing room at the Waldorf Astoria in NYC after Louis Armstrong has completed a show.  It's March 1971, several months before his death, and it is the setting for Satchmo At The Waldorf which we saw at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven last night.  If you have a chance, go.  The play has received very positive reviews and its New Haven run was just extended until November 11 before it moves on to Philadelphia.

Satchmo is the first play written by Terry Teachout, the author of Pops, the wonderful 2009 biography of Louis Armstrong - a book that stirred my renewed interest in Armstrong and his music (see the post Pops).  He's now taken the unusual step for a theater critic (he writes for the Wall St Journal) of becoming a playwright. (Teachout)

Satchmo is a one-actor, ninety minute piece.  The Armstrong portrayed is more than just the smiling performer you remember from his onstage appearances.  By turns he is funny, poignant and angry.  It's hard to pull off a one-actor play and even harder when the one-actor is playing two very different characters but it works because the actor, John Douglas Thompson, is extraordinary.  Thompson is Armstrong and also his white mob-connected manager of four decades, Joe Glaser, and it is the complicated relationship between the two that is at the heart of the show.  The first time Thompson transitioned in a heartbeat from being Armstrong to being Glaser was stunning and you could almost hear the collective astonishment of the audience.  Seamlessly transforming himself back and forth he embodied Armstrong and Glaser in a way that conveyed their bond with all of its mixture of love, calculation, suspicion, exasperation and anger.                                                                                  (John Douglas Thompson)

Before seeing the show I was a little worried that the Armstrong story could come off as stiff and unnatural in a theatre setting but I (and it looked like everyone else) was riveted for the entire time by a compelling and touching script and performance.

Teachout decided to write the play because it gave him more freedom to write about this relationship than he had as a biographer:

"Much of what he and Glaser say in the play derives from things that they said in real life, and the way in which both men talk on stage is an accurate portrayal of their habits of speech . . . But the play is still a work of fiction, albeit one that is freely based on fact.  It's an attempt to suggest the nature of their personal relationship, which was so fraught with tension that no mere biographer, obligated as he is to stick to the factual record, could hope to do more than hint at its endless subtleties.  Fictionalizing that relationship has freed me to speculate about things that I cannot know for sure but have good reason to suspect."

(Armstrong & Glaser)











Along the way, Thompson also briefly transforms into a third character, Miles Davis.  Davis appreciated Armstrong's contributions to jazz but was brutally critical of what he saw as Louis' backwards attitudes about race.  Armstrong, in turn, was enraged by Miles' criticism.

Miles Davis and Glaser are the bookends of the racial tensions that existed throughout Louis Armstrong's career.  In the latter part of his career, Armstrong felt he lost his black audience, playing almost exclusively to whites.  This is made good use of in Satchmo, when Armstrong is talking about this phenomenon and then looks out at us and remarks that we are an all-white audience.  And in the Armstrong-Glaser association how much of their interaction was driven by the conventions of race in mid-century America?  Was Glaser ever Armstrong's friend?  All of this is unflinchingly examined in Satchmo yet in a way that is consistent with the man portrayed by Teachout in Pops, a man who "lived life in a major key".  I left with a smile on my face.