Last Tuesday evening, President Obama and the First Lady hosted an evening of Broadway music at the White House. The performers included Nathan Lane, Elaine Stritch, Audra McDonald, Tonya Pinkins, Marvin Hamlisch and Idina Menzel. The show was taped and will be run as a one-hour special on PBS on October 20, which I would imagine means a lot of it will be trimmed out.
In the Broadway chat rooms, they're speculating Ms. Stritch's performance of "I'm Still Here" — one of two numbers she performed — will not make air. Reportedly, she kept forgetting the lyrics and there are reports that she uttered a few words that one usually does not say at the White House or in front of the presidential children. (The mainstream press is reporting the problem with lyrics but not the profanity, so perhaps the latter did not occur.) Stritch has recently taken over, along with Bernadette Peters, in the new revival of A Little Night Music, currently playing at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. Several playgoers have said online that she is forgetting dialogue there, as well.
I hope this is not so…or if it is that someone will arrange for Ms. Stritch to retire gracefully. She's 84 and has had a wonderful career. It would be sad if it ended with her making audiences uncomfortable…and not in a good way.
In the mid-eighties, I saw Rex Harrison in his sold-out "farewell" tour of My Fair Lady. He was around 75 and generally fine for the first half of the show. But from about "The Rain in Spain" onward, you could feel his energy plunging and he began to take unplanned pauses in speeches while he strained to recall the ends of sentences, then finally and clumsily paraphrased what he was supposed to have said. Finally, in "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," he forgot the lyrics completely a few times and had to have someone off-stage prompt him with the words. Each time it happened, you could feel an entire audience at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood cringe in unison that everyone in the building knew the words and Mr. Harrison did not. In the end, we were all probably happy we went. We could all forever say, "I saw Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady," which was a lot of what the tour was all about, I'm sure. But a lot of it was rather sad.
Anyway, here are the President's opening remarks…
And now here, Nathan Lane — looking a bit like he's there under duress — introduces a scaled-down performance of the finale from Hairspray…
