Review: Fun Evening of Adrienne Barbeau's THERE ARE WORSE THINGS I COULD DO
On Friday April 6 and Saturday April 7 actress/author/minister Adrienne Barbeau brought An Evening with Adrienne Barbeau: There Are Worse Things I Could Do to the Debbie Reynolds Mainstage Theatre of the El Portal in NoHo. Playwright Brian Christopher Williams, a good personal friend of Barbeau's, moderated the evening. For 95 minutes Barbeau and Williams sat in comfortable chairs onstage and talked about her life which began in California and then moved onto New York and back. Barbeau is still youthful and beautiful at 72 and has such warmth and honesty oozing from every pore that the audience hung on every word. The evening never lagged. The time moved quickly and an enthusiastic Q and A followed with Barbeau still beaming.
Backed by a projection screen, Barbeau showed stills of her life as well as clips from TV and her various horror films directed by John Carpenter, Wes Craven and George Romero. "The Fog", "Swamp Thing", "Escape from New York" and "Creepshow" are the most popular four that have kept her attending horror genre conventions through the years to the delight of her innumerable fans.
Let's go back to the beginning. Barbeau did many musicals with the San Jose Civic Light Opera as a teen in the 60s before venturing to NYC with only a thousand dollars in her pocket. She was one of the lucky ones who learned through experience, like dancing discotheque style in a small club, doing summer stock, appearing in This Was Burlesque with stripper Ann Corio as well as doing a now infamous nudie musical called "Stag Movie" in which she stood on her head with the nipples of her large breasts cascading into her mouth. She enjoyed every moment of telling this story and the crowd was in stitches. Barbeau was thrilled to land the role of Tevye's daughter Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, in which she appeared with Better Midler and finally in 1972 to create the first Betty Rizzo in Grease for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She described their original production of Grease as "gritty" unlike the 1978 film that she called jazzed up, based on hearing Stockard Channing sing "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" on the radio. In the background we were treated to Barbeau's quite moving rendition of the song.
TV followed Broadway with "Maude", playing Bea Arthur's daughter Carol. She described this whole experience as sheer fun and lauded Arthur as a great team player and human being, nothing like her character Maude Findlay. Later came films with movie director John Carpenter whom she married and had a son Cody and later a marriage to Billy Van Zandt with whom she had twin boys. All three sons bring her joy and pride. Careerwise she did "The Cannonball Run" with Burt Reynolds, whom she romanced, telling of an 18 page breakup letter that he wrote her proclaiming his love for her but loyalty to Dinah Shore. Barbeau also did voice overs and animation before penning her autobiography also entitled There Are Worse Things I Could Do and thrilling sci-fi novels about vampires, one "Love Bites" currently being optioned for a screenplay.
Anecdotes that Barbeau told during the course of the show were very enjoyable, only one off- color. I would love to have heard her sing a couple of songs. She did do a few bars of a 60s rock song that she used for an audition and sounded terrific. with the same powerful belting voice she had in Grease. She only said nice things about the people she worked with, and as mentioned earlier, described the whole work process as not work at all, just a whole lot of fun.
Adrienne Barbeau looks more beautiful than ever and proves what a delightful human being she is. She really glows with an optimistic spirit of living and this definitely transcends the footlights. And what an incredibly versatile talent! Don't miss her when she appears again onstage! In the meantime watch "Maude" on fetv and rent her creepy but intriguing movies, in which she shows an uncanny sense of bravery performing with rats, snakes and other wild creatures. Wildly daring was also her strong suit swinging on a trapeze in the last stage version of Pippin as Berthe in 2015. Brava!
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