Call Me Madam News

Elaine Stritch has staged her party with the bare minimums: a high-backed bar stool, a big white shirt over black tights and a swinging band.

She's here to tell her life story, and she captivates for more than two hours in her limited engagement at Hartford Stage.

'Elaine Stritch at Liberty' is her unvarnished look at a life in the theater. The Tony-winning show is a lesson in the power of storytelling.

And what a life. She understudied Ethel Merman in 'Call Me Madam' while simultaneously playing in a revival of 'Pal Joey.' As she relates the highly amusing story of commuting back and forth from New York City to the Shubert in New Haven - complicated by checking in at 7:30 p.m. to make sure Merman was going on - Stritch races across the stage, becoming breathless as she takes the audience back on forth on the Merritt Parkway, through snowstorms and occasional rides in a former Yalie boyfriend's sports car.

“Andrew Lloyd Webber memorial pool”

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I didn't know I knew who Richard Eastham was, and I surely didn't know that he was born in Opelousas, until I ran across a little biography of him while looking up something else. via The Daily Advertiser

At the top of her Tony-winning bio show "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" in 2002, Stritch entered while hauling an oversized stool on and offstage, as if to demonstrate the hustle and bustle of being a Broadway ... via AMNY

“Many in the West, the Midwest, and the South -- people who had never experienced her live, thanks to her dislike of touring -- regarded her from her records and TV appearances as crass, vulgar, and loud -- the vocal equivalent of a rusty saw”

By Brian Kellow Viking. 326 pp. $25.95 BRASS DIVA The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman By Caryl Flinn Univ. via The Washington Post