Review: POPS GOT CHOPS: 'SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF' IS A WONDERFUL ONE-MAN SHOW at Schoolhouse Theater

Years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing one Mr. Steve Martin. I choose the word privilege purposefully, because behind the “wild and crazy guy” sophomoric conceit on which he burst onto the scene 50 years ago resides the mind of a keen and rigorous intellect.

During the interview, conducted on a couch in Las Vegas during a movie industry convention where he had just performed with his usual brio, the wild and crazy guy was as dry and serious a guy offstage as he was unhinged and hilarious on stage.

That anecdote about one celebrity is not a one-off. Our perception of performers in general is just that: a self-affirming perception that doesn’t necessarily equate with their private reality.

Take, for example, iconic entertainer Louis Armstrong. That’s what Terry Teachout did when the late, great theater critic of The Wall Street Journal decided to dramatize for the stage what it was like to be Louis Armstrong. Right there, you have a perception vs. reality divide, because the man who warmed to being called Pops and Satchmo never referred to himself as “Louie,” even if the rest of the world did (“I ain’t no Frenchman,” he’d say.)  

The result is Mr. Teachout’s fascinating portrait of “the world’s greatest trumpet player,” packaged as a 90-minute, one-act, one-man show titled “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” which currently is on the boards through June 8 at the reliably quality-conscious Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, N.Y.

The tightly produced, crisply presented piece stars Wali Jamal in a thoroughly engaging and formidable performance that also profiles Mr. Armstrong’s lifelong manager Mr. Joe Glaser and another deity straight from the Mount Olympus of jazz, Mr. Miles Davis.  

But doesn’t that make this a three-man – not a one-man –show? It does, except all three characters communicate to the audience through the versatile vessel that is Mr. Jamal.

There are no tricks of the acting trade at play here. He’s not impersonating any of the three, but very skillfully representing them. Throughout, the actor repeatedly shifts the register in his voice just enough to signal to us he’s now Armstrong, then he’s Glaser, now he’s Davis, toggling among the three for the duration of the show. Mr. Jamal effectively and efficiently paints this triptych of characters with just the right shading of vocal inflection and demeanor.

As Glaser, he affects a streetwise, rough-around-the-vowels intonation by way of Brooklyn that instantly separates him from the Armstrong “sawmill voice.” As the prickly yet silky Miles Davis, Mr. Jamal slides into a low, conspiratorial-sounding tone. The actor’s Armstrong is pretty much as we remember the real deal: affable, expansive, a trademark smile as big as his genius. That familiar white handkerchief he would clutch makes a couple of cameo appearances in a nod to Armstrong’s omnipresent prop.

White also is the compellingly pristine motif of the set design. Created by internationally recognized painter and artist Tom Christopher (lit by Dennis Parichy), in the style of Brutalism from the 1920s, it favors a form of forced perspective, accenting off-kilter angles, such as trapezoids, to suggest, perhaps, the artist’s eccentricity, which in select cases – this being one of them – qualifies as a synonym for genius.

“Satchmo at the Waldorf” is directed by the estimable Bram Lewis, whose own whip-smart artistry is indelibly stamped on this finely-calibrated production. He allows as how “eccentricity is often associated with genius, intellectual giftedness, or creativity.” In his program notes, the director’s take on the set is that, “More than anything, we are up in Louis’s head.”

As the playwright peels back the curtain of Armstrong’s public persona, among the passel of insights and reveals we happen upon is that he cussed like a sailor, virtually every other sentence laced with earthy language. Yet, issuing from the congenial countenance that is Louie – I mean Louis – Armstrong, even those swear words acquire a sheen that doesn’t feel abrasive or offensive. They in fact feel, appropriately enough, musical. That was the magic of the man and the charisma that trumpeted him.

In a script note, Mr. Teachout allows, “This is a work of fiction based freely on fact.” It’s difficult to discern what’s fictive about this so-called “act of reminiscence” the author has conjured. And it doesn’t matter. With each successive remembrance, the author, actor and director combine to cast their lot into the audience and then reel us in as our mounting curiosity takes the bait to chew on. There is no shortage of nourishment.

 The title “Satchmo at the Waldorf” suggests a focus on one musical performance (which would be his last), in 1971, at gilded high society hotel The Waldorf-Astoria. Instead, the title works slyly as a nuanced metaphor, because that title trumpets a personal triumph of surmounting decades of dehumanizing racism: It refers not so much to his playing the Waldorf’s Empire Room as it does to his not being prohibited – as he had been throughout his storied career -- from sleeping in a guest room because of the color of his skin. After years of being barred, even as a headliner, from checking into hotels and dining in restaurants while on tour, Mr. Armstrong adopted the credo, “If you can’t stay, don’t play.” He and his bandmates had been forced to virtually grovel at the back door of restaurant kitchens for meals, urinate in the bushes, and sleep on the bus. He notes it happened in the North as well as the South.

Throughout his career, accolades accumulated for Louis Armstrong. First Black musician on the cover of Time magazine. First Black to get star billing in a Hollywood movie (“High Society.”) First Black to helm his own radio show. Early-career billing as “World’s Greatest Trumpet Player.” Revered as a “Walking Smithsonian Institution of Jazz.” Credited with the “biggest things done for jazz: singing and swinging with a sawmill voice.”

It’s not all that far-fetched to think of barrier-buster Jackie Robinson as baseball’s Louis Armstrong – or Satchmo as jazz’s Jackie Robinson.

Yet that horn of plenty of acclaim did not immunize him to serial slights perpetrated by those who otherwise worshipped Pops’ chops.

He credits manager Joe Glaser with giving him his voice, literally, by advising him to add vocals to his horn-only repertoire, and by being a buffer between the gifted musician and notorious names who strong-armed Armstrong, namely the likes of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.

We learn that Bing Crosby befriended him and paid him the highest of compliments, “Satchmo, I learned it all from you.” Still, their surface mutual admiration society aside, Satchmo doesn’t miss the opportunity to let us know that Der Bingle “never did ask me over to his house.” He discloses the same bruised feeling about Joe Glaser, though, in the end, for Louis, that was the least of his manager’s hypocritical high-handedness that devastated his client emotionally.  

Both Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis roundly resented what they considered Mr. Armstr
ong’s “Uncle Tom” act of clowning in his regular appearances on such high-profile platforms as TV juggernaut The Ed Sullivan Show, which was high-powered, Sunday evening appointment viewing in the mid-20th Century.

We also learn that Satchmo always wore a Star of David given to him by Joe Glaser. Yet, perhaps the most jarring revelation for those familiar with the Louis Armstrong songbook is what his true feelings were about the hit record that made him the oldest singer to top the Billboard charts, knocking The Beatles from that perch in 1964: his private assessment of “Hello, Dolly” as a musical composition can be summed up in four letters that start with “s” and end with “t.”

As this wonderful show neared its conclusion, no sooner had it occurred to me that one Armstrong evergreen had gone unmentioned than that wonderful tune began to play. It never fails to choke me up, and for good reason: our late son Harrison, who passed at 15, had a rare form of dwarfism that limited his height at 38 inches and led to three heart surgeries and many challenges, but none of that stopped him from embracing life to the fullest with an outsize personality and standard of excellence. Harrison’s favorite song? What else but “(What a) Wonderful World.”  

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