Theater economics making only marginally more sense than the West Virginia steel business, soon everything will be one-man shows. Right now it just feels that way. By the time it’s literally true, it may be that some far-sighted and bargain-minded producers will be cutting costs and offering us the no-man show—An Evening Without Rosie O’Donnell, Ian McKellen Stays Home, etc. But for now one can be reasonably sure that the advertised attraction—Bea Arthur, Kevin Bacon, Steven Berkoff, Alan King, Elaine Stritch—will show up.
With the exception of Kevin Bacon, I’m not sure any of the above is a star. And Bacon, with his long list of appealingly trashy movies, isn’t a Broadway star. But then there aren’t any Broadway stars any more. Inheriting by default are a select group of indestructible old broads who’ve been around, or at least nearby. They’re growly and gravelly, smoky and boozy. They talk dirty. They have anecdotes. (I was once on a radio show where the elderly actress, her interview cut short before she’d got in her big Olivier story, protested, “But I haven’t told my Larry!”) And, of course, they sing Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” usually as the finale: “First you’re another/ Sloe-eyed vamp/ Then someone’s mother/ Then you’re camp.”
“Not long ago, I spoke to Stephen Sondheim,” says the star of Elaine Stritch at Liberty, introducing the number at the Neil Simon, “and I told him I had heard women in their sixties, fifties,
