WPCNR Stage Door. Review By John F. Bailey, From Row M-110, White Plains Performing Arts Center December 7, 2003: Walk right in! Take your seat, Mr. and Mrs. White Plains. The new inviting, gently curved stage has a piano, bass, skins, sax and trumpet stand. The bass drum sports a stylish “A.” You hear a snaredrum rolloff, a stately cadence the opening procession, and complete with umbrella, Andre’ De Shields and his “All Stars” turn the new WPPAC into the old Savoy Ballroom in South Chicago with the Ghost of Louis Armstrong Past “in session.”
The contagious good feeling, toe-tapping sultry music Louis Armstrong radiated and imparted to millions over his sixty years creating jazz with his cornet, Miss Selma, “for the applause” (as Andre’ De Shields puts it so simply towards the close of Ambassador Satch), is back in a one-man tour de force playing a gig on Main Street and City Place. Photo by WPCNR StageCam.
Mr. De Shields, star of Broadway’s The Wiz, Ain’t MisBehavin’, Play On! and The Full Monty, has Mr. Armstrong’s style, swagger, stutter step and panache’. Matching him in spirit, spunk, style and talent is the sensually smouldering Ms. Stacie Precia in her debut in the show, playing Mr. Armstrong’s four wives. De Shields and Precia bring a legend to life, and tell of a way of life, robustly, ribaldly recreating that old Armstrong alchemy.
Satch blends clips of the star at the end of his life grousing about modern “cool critics” to a messenger in his dressing room, or to his white piano player trying to get “Old Pops” back on stage, with Mr. De Shields’ own silky, soulful rendering of Armstrong classics that put the “bl” in Blues. Mr. De Shields puts the black and the blue into Black and Blue, a very moving delivery and the good news into What a Wonderful World. Ambassador Satch tells it the way it was for Louis, tells us what jazz is, “like a life, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” and “it feels like life.”
Packs an Ethnic Wallop
In an audience where there was only one black person, “white” White Plains saw a raunchy, unapologetic reflection of a black performer entertaining a white world, and from time-to-time, how Mr. Armstrong felt about doing that. There are very bad, but funny jokes, performer-to-audience repartee and “Armstrongnicity.”
Ambassador Satch’s clever, blunt writing, shows us just a little of the trouble Louis Armstrong has seen, in Act One. However, Ambassador Satch does not sugarcoat the pill. The audience joins in singing chants on the street when Mr. Armstrong was a kid “with bottlecaps on his bare toes,” tapdancing on the street in the New Orleans redlight district,“Storyville,” to The Bucket’s Got a Hole In It. Here the audience sings along and gets into the spirit.
Or go to the superbly textured “Mississippi-slow” tune of When It’s Sleepy Time Down South. Mr. De Shields muddies the lyrics in vintage Satchmo slur, while his “new All-Stars” back him up with the pronounced intermingling of parts that liberated artists and gave birth to the jazz.
Actor, Singer, Raconteur, De Shields Works the Audience, Wins Them Over.
De Shields’ singing voice does not have the vintage Armstrong rasp. He’s more of a silky, mellow Billy Eckstein, but that is no matter. The man has range, he has style, he can “scat-talk,” he can “bubalabogalaboo” (if you don’t know what I mean by that, you will know when you see the show), and he can dance, with “that glide in his stride.”
De Shields delivers the payload the way Louis Armstrong entertained. He creates the sheer enthusiasm and joy Louis did, pulling you in spite of yourself to share in the obvious joy he is having performing for you, (if you can dig that sentence, brothers and sisters).
As one gentleman in his eighties said to me, who said he saw Louis Armstrong perform in person, “Mr. De Shields is not Louis Armstrong, he evokes “the nostalgia” for the artist.”
Fetching Foil Fills Four Roles
Mr. De Shields has a feisty foil in his co-star, Stacie Precia. The earthy smoulderess delivers the spitfire of Daisy Parker, Armstrong’s jealous first wife. She articulates with control and charm, the domineering careerist, Lil Harding. She has the most fun when she slinks salaciously and irresistibly as the seductive, captivating “goldigger, Alpha Smith (wife # 3). Then switches completely to establish the demure Lucille Wilson in Act Two. Ms. Precia displays distinct camillionability that one viewer I spoke with did not realize the four wives were played by the same person. Play them she does. They were all strong women. I liked them all. Louis had taste.
She handles black dialect for the prostitute Daisy, delivering an energetic mock fight with him, choreographed cleverly with Mr. De Shields to Brick House Stomp. She reminisces in a sophisticated style of Lil describing how Louis first looked when he got to Chicago, and she remade him, managed his money, and took charge.
Then, for someone completely different, changes to the glamorous and sexual Alpha Smith, captivatingly “torchy” as she belts out Why Don’t You Do Right? Don’t know what “torch” is? Ms. Precia lets you hear it, delivering this very suggestive number in a style her own that is part Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee, if you can imagine such a combination. (She also has a great cadillac walk, too.) She does another turn as Lucille, Louis’ fourth spouse, when she is introduced in a most unique way, and duets with Mr. De Shields charmingly in Baby, It’s Cold Outside.
The two stars click together in each romantic combination they cameo. You can feel the chemistry. In a few short lines and repartee between each pair, the dynamics and appeals of each relationship Louis had with the four women come through. In Satch, you get four romances in one with heartbreak.
Five Cool Cats.
Mr. De Shield’s new “All Stars,” the sidemen who recreate the sounds of Armstrong’s bands, are very cool cats for a combo of diversity. Terry Waldo has as the elegant touch of Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, Ken Crutchfield is Lionel Hampton on Drums for a night, Michel Hashim delivers the old mellow of Jimmy Strong on Soprano Sax and Tenor Sax, and David Grego on string bass and tuba back up Mr. De Shields vocals with intricate style. Grego’s tuba solo on Rascal is virtuoso Dixieland. You won’t believe what he does with it. (Dan Block on Clarinet, Brian Nalepka on Bass, and David Grant on Trumpet and Riley Mullins on Trumpet will also play the show on future dates.)
Stanton Davis on backup trumpet deserves a stand all his own for his magnificent tone, his buttery lips, his mastery of Satchmo riffs and his two hours of virtuoso Armstronging with Mr. De Shields. The band also banters well with Mr. De Shields, a very cool chemistry that embroiders the night club atmosphere. All that’s missing from this dance hall is the cigar smoke and the cigarette girls (which is against code in White Plains).
Mr.Waldo deserves a tip of the hat for spirited dueting with the stage dominant Mr. De Shields, holding his own in Old Rockin’ Chair in Act Two, that reprises a little vaudeville, and a lot of Mr. Armstrong’s melancholy at modern critics. The two interplay well.
Occasionally “The New All Stars” are a little tooooo cool and jivey, a little too Mingus, a little too jazz sounding. Nevertheless, they shine capturing the molasses sweet style solo turns that created the cacophonously seamless originality of Armstrong’s bands on West End Blues, Black and Blue and I’m Confessin’. The five bring the house down on a rambunctious, shouting, Dixieland style revenge song, You, Rascal You in Act Two.
Signature Song
Act Two, delivers a visual and musical mock: Mr. Armstrong’s hilarious parody of the cool jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth century, who were criticizing Armstrong’s style. It tells of his courage during the 1954 segregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas schools. (A fact, “Mr. Armstrong” points out that he says, “I bet you you didn’t know that,” and I did not.)
Mr. De Shields is at his most reflective in Act Two letting us see the hurt inside the heart, especially when he sings Black and Blue, in a more anguished and revealing tone than the way Mr. Armstrong did it in 1928. That song is Mr. De Shield’s signature song in the show. The lyrics will haunt you as you leave the theatre.
A striking point Louis makes to the audience is that there’s really nothing new in music. The show pointed that out to me. I recognized the up tempo Dixieland You Rascal You as the exact melody of Chuck Berry’s 40 Days hit in the 1950s. Chuck simply changed the words from You Rascal You to “40 Days.”
Ambassador Satch is a dance hall, it’s a bigger-than-legend personality come back to life. It’s entertainment that reaches out from one joyous soul to yours, creating that bond between entertainer and entertainee in its purest form the way Louis Armstrong did wherever he went and entertained.
The Critics would Recognize this Louis Armstrong of 2003.
Or, as Irving Kolodin, music critic for the New York Times wrote of Louis Armstrong in 1929,
He backs off downstage left, leans half-way over like a quarter-miler, begins to count (swaying as he doe) one, two, three…he has already started racing toward the rear where the orchestra is ranged, and he hits four executes a slide and a pirouette; winds up facing the audience and blowing the first note as the orchestra swings into the tune. It’s mad, it’s meaningless, it’s hokum of the first order, but the effect is electrifying. No shabby pretense about this boy! He knows what his audience will take to their hearts and he gives it to them. His trumpet virtuousity is endless—triplets, chromatic accented eerie counterpoints that turn the tune inside out, wild sorties into the giddy stratosphere…all executed with impeccable style and finish, exploits that make his contemporaries sound like so many Salvation Army cornetists. Alternately singing choruses and daubing with the handkerchief at throat, face, forehead (he perspires like a dying gladiator)…
The same words could be written today about Mr. De Shields’ performance, who has meticulously captured this style while keeping in character, and remaining his own actor. He is Andre’ De Shields playing Louis Armstrong.
You feel a sense of loss as you leave the theatre. The audience was in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and up, with about 125 persons in the 417-seat house. The few members I spoke to seemed struck by the experience. It is a different musical. They liked it. They thought it was fantastic. Many stayed afterwords to “dig” the pictures of Louis Armstrong in the Art Lobby, borrowed from the Louis Armstrong house in Corona, Queens.
Satchmo plays White Plains again Tuesday evening at 7 P.M, through December 21. The number of the theatre is 328-1600.
It is a show that makes you feel his music and his pain and be the wiser for it. At the end of this show, the audience didn’t want this afternoon to end.
Intermission: Kudos go to the Lighting Designer, Burke Wilmore who interplays color and patterns to transform the ornate bandstand into a time machine with very striking showcase hues that create illusions of memories and moods. Choreography by Mercedes Ellington gave the audience a spicy and naughty series of interminglings between Mr. De Shields and Ms. Precia, while demanding much of Mr. De Shield’s six foot frame with which he dazzles with his splits, tap-dances, and slides.
The new WPPAC stage stars itself, showing it has plenty of room to house an orchestra and still give Ms. Precia and Mr. De Shields plenty of room to dance like Fred and Ginger.
Jeffrey Rosenstock, Executive Director, opened the performance once again thanking the audience for being pioneers as the White Plains Performing Arts Center grows. He said “We are very grateful. You are the backbone of this theatre.” He thanked them for persevering through the growing pains, which he said, one was “enduring a parking garage without proper signage,” (which is now in place, I am happy to report). Mr. Rosenstock also notes the theatre is in need of volunteer ushers, if interested, do contact the theatre at 328-1600.
The rest rooms have “21” quality, the equal of any posh hotel, marble floors.
The acoustics of the theatre are very supportive of live music. The sound fills the hall, surrounds you, and reaches out to you. If you’re a musician, you are going to love performing in this hall. Louis Armstrong would.
