Bea
Arthur uses songs and anecdotes to tell the story of her six-decade
career in theater, film and TV. The performer captivates, even if
the one-woman show is less than intimate.
By
Philip Brandes
Photos by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
Remember the old joke about charismatic
performers being able to read a phone book onstage and get away with
it? Bea Arthur passes a similar test with flying colors, reciting
a recipe for leg of lamb in her opening to “…And Then
There’s Bea,” her one-woman show making a whistle-stop
on its pre-Broadway tour at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.
The
feisty veteran Arthur is an original, an increasing rarity in a show-business
environment shaped more by market demographics than strong personalities.
Wielding her signature husky contralto and earthy humor to cut through
pretension, she proves she can captivate an audience in a mostly full
1,800-seat theater with the steps of lamb marinade as easily as with
the anthology of songs and stories she’s been “storing
up over the years.”
Accompanied
on the piano by close friend and composer Billy Goldenberg (who co-created
this show), Arthur draws on a rich and varied career that spans six
decades of work on the stage, screen and, of course, television, reminiscing
fondly on the turning points, good and bad. Predictably, her stints
on the long-running “Maude” and “The Golden Girls”
figure prominently. More surprisingly, she confides her warmest memories
are of her appearance as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s Broadway
adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera”—not only because
of her admiration for Bertolt Brecht’s plunge into the decadence
of the 1930s, but for the opportunity to work with Lotte Lenya. Arthur’s
rendition of “Threepenny’s” “Pirate Jenny”
is one of the show’s musical high points, along with affecting
renditions of Kurt Weill’s “It Never Was You,” Jerry
Herman’s “Bosom Buddies” and Irving Berlin’s
“Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Absent by design
is a rendition of the too-obvious Stephen Sondheim show-biz-survivor
anthem, “I’m Still Here,” although Goldenberg’s
sly musical snippet of it during the curtain call sets up the show’s
best sight gag.
Other
amusing anecdotes about prominent co-stars and collaborators include
Tallulah Bankhead’s breezy good humor about gossip romantically
linking her to a gay member of a “Ziegfeld Follies” revival,
and Arthur’s illusion-bursting realization while doing the original
“Mame” on Broadway that beneath star Angela Lansbury’s
polished patrician veneer, Bea’s longtime friend has “a
mouth like a longshoreman,” with a fondness for low-brow, raunchy
humor. Not to be outdone, Arthur relates a few earthy (and unprintable)
jokes of her own.
Arthur’s
stories include hardships as well as triumphs. An open call for a
road-company tour of “Call Me Mister” ended embarrassingly
for her when the musical director persuaded her to switch her prepared
piece for a rendition of “Summertime”—during which
she realized she’d forgotten all but the opening lyric. But
for Arthur, even the missteps had their silver linings. Her stint
in the obscure “Shoestring Revue” happened to catch the
eye of Norman Lear, who created the role of Edith Bunker’s liberal
cousin Maude for her—and the rest was television history.
We
learn a lot about the contours of Arthur’s career during the
course of the show, but she keeps her private life at guarded distance.
Of course, not every solo performer needs to bare their struggles
with failed relationships or life-threatening illness, but a better
writer could establish more personal connections to the material Arthur
presents, and the lessons she’s drawn from her life. As it is,
what we get is familiarity without intimacy.
