The Play's The Thing

Max and I don’t get to travel as often as we want to.  That work thing keeps interfering with that life thing.  But when we do get away, we have a great time finding new places to go and new things to do.

This past weekend, we went to Chicago by way of St. Louis to see “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a play written by my friend Terry Teachout that is running for a couple of weeks at the Court Theater on Chicago’s South side.  The play is based on one chapter of Terry’s book Pops, a biography of the great Louis Armstrong.  We had already seen the play in Beverly Hills this past summer, but I wanted to see it in a different location with a different actor (it’s a one-man show) and a different director. 

While the feel of the Chicago version is similar to the Beverly Hills version, Barry Shabaka Henley inhabits all three of the play’s characters – Louis Armstrong, Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis – in a completely different way from John Douglas Thompson’s portrayals.  The stage is also different in this iteration; in Beverly Hills, the set was a replica of Armstrong’s dressing room at the Waldorf; in Chicago, Armstrong addresses the audience from a mostly bare stage, as he bares his soul to those who are listening.

What is not different is the poignancy with which Armstrong details the struggles he faced as a black man wanting to play music in a segregated society, and then as a black musician who won over white audiences to his cultural detriment; at the end of his life, Armstrong’s audiences were mostly white, as black audiences and other black musicians dismissed him as an old man with old ways who played to white America.  Armstrong merely wanted to play his music, and he tells of his puzzlement at the lack of loyalty from those who followed in his footsteps, those for whom Armstrong opened many doors.

The main conflict, however, exists in Armstrong’s relationship with his white, Jewish manager, Joe Glaser.  This conflict threads through Armstrong’s telling about his impoverished childhood, his very human foibles, his path to fame, and his love of music, until the conflict reaches its sad climax.  The play moves to denouement in very dramatic fashion, but what actually happened is a little less salacious (As Terry has said, this play is a work of fiction; if it isn’t in the book, it didn’t happen).  Regardless, Armstrong never knew exactly what happened between Glaser and him, realizing only that his own life was not spared one of the things that makes a good story:  betrayal.

“Satchmo at the Waldorf” is now playing at the Court Theater in Chicago, as well as at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater in San Francisco.  In May, Terry himself is directing the play in West Palm Beach, Florida.  I think I may try to go to that, as well!  Florida in May sounds much better than Chicago in January.  But it was well worth the weather risk – and we saw first hand Chicago’s reputation:  The Windy City.  And that’s another story.