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Wednesday, February 27, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

NEW YORK -- Strrr-itchy!" Noel Coward used to call, summoning Elaine Stritch's attention with teasing familiarity and hauteur. Since what followed was usually good career advice or the offer of a role, her attention was rewarded more fully, she ruefully admits, than it was by some of the men in her life.

Near the end of Act 1 of "Elaine Stritch at Liberty," her sweetly triumphant one-woman show, she stitches together a sequence of song and anecdote about Coward's 1961 musical, "Sail Away." Hers was the second female lead, a role Coward imagined her in from the start, a wryly comic social director on a cruise ship. But by the end of the show's own shakedown cruise, Stritch's role had grown into the lead: She ended up getting the laughs and the guy, as well.

Judging by this funny, gutsy and melancholy musical autobiography, that wasn't usually the case. The laughs, yes, but not the guys -- although anecdotes about her relationships, some more consummated (Gig Young, Ben Gazzara) than others (Richard Burton, Rock Hudson!), are an important part of the show's comic-sad appeal.

Stritch's experience in "Sail Away" also summarizes her career in a more important way: Though she started as a comic second lead, she was already a character actress -- witness her dramatic work in "Bus Stop," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Delicate Balance." And she did eventually grow, through dint of wear, tear, experience and survival, into a star. "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" is the glorious proof of that, a theatrical tour de force in which Stritch, improbably 77, holds the stage all alone, with just expertise and heart, taking us on an enticing anecdotal journey that has a surprisingly dramatic core.

Another emblem is "Zip," the tartly funny Rodgers and Hart showstopper she sang in the 1952 revival of "Pal Joey." While pantomiming a stripper elegantly shedding a glove or a hat, the song listens in on her deeper thoughts. Here, Stritch performs it with gravely deadpan aplomb, intercutting it with a long, tumultuous story of how she performed it each day in New Haven at the same time she was standing by for Ethel Merman in "Call Me Madam" -- checking in at the Broadway theater a half-hour before the curtain, then dashing to New Haven, a feat requiring a fast car and the nerves of a cat burglar.

Like that sequence, Stritch's whole show is skilled, canny comedy, promising a surface striptease but delivering an unexpected view of the mind and even the heart.

The script, crafted by Stritch and critic-playwright John Lahr (constructed by Lahr and reconstructed by Stritch, the program says) out of her memories and nearly a dozen and a half songs, intertwines the ups and downs of her career and emotional life. Show biz anecdotes provide most of the fun, since this is a woman who worked with Merman, Coward, Erwin Piscator, George Abbott, Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, you name it. The dark comes from alcoholism that began in her teen-age years and from failed love relationships (some given comic shading by her early ignorance about sex) -- and when she finally does marry, her husband is taken by cancer after only 10 years.

However long Act 1 is, it goes by in a flash. Stritch gives value for money: The show runs 2 2/3 very full hours. She's dressed in a simple blouse and tights, accompanied only by a stool, but George C. Wolfe's direction and Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer's lights add shape and variety, and Rob Bowman directs a nine-piece musical combo that provides richly varied support.

Like "Zip," other songs serve as frames for extended sequences, such as the show-opening "There's No Business Like Show Business," studded with funny anecdotes, including one about the Trinity Theater in McKeesport. Other songs are inevitable, especially two by Sondheim -- "The Ladies Who Lunch," which Stritch famously sang in the 1970 premiere of "Company," and "I'm Still Here," which she never sang in "Follies" but which she makes her own in a show for which it could serve as the title anthem.

The actual title, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty," is an artful pun. Yes, she is at her uninhibited best: There's little soft-peddling. Not only are her own often-interrelated problems with liquor and men presented frankly, so are the failings of others. Marge Champion cannot enjoy seeing Stritch parody what she thought as self-indulgent behavior in a famous production of "The Women" from which Stritch was summarily dismissed.

But "at liberty" is also a traditional theater euphemism for being between jobs -- which Stritch has indeed sometimes been. Not now. The ultimate Broadway baby is right where she belongs.

At the Neil Simon Theatre, 250 W. 52 St.; call 800-755-4000.