A Facebook friend recently posted a clip of Louis Armstrong making a guest appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970. On "Blue Yodel 9," Cash sang and Armstrong played the trumpet, recreating a 1930 recording Armstrong made with early country star Jimmie Rodgers. For the most part, Armstrong stuck to the trumpet, but on the brief yodeling interludes, Armstrong joined in, and each time the audience would burst into applause. The audience, it was clear, wanted to hear Armstrong sing.
In Satchmo at the Waldorf, in which Armstrong mentions performing with Cash, Armstrong's business-savvy manager confides that, indeed, audiences had grown much more interested in hearing the warm gravel of that generously inviting voice than the brassy toot-toots Armstrong still wanted to offer. You can credit �" or blame �" "Hello, Dolly!" for the irrevocability of this conversion.
"Just between you and me, 'Hello, Dolly!' ain't much of a song," Armstrong tells us in his dressing room just after a 1971 gig at the Waldorf-Astoria, also the year of his death. In one of the funniest moments in Terry Teachout's absorbing one-man play at ACT's Geary Theater, Armstrong recalls a concert at which the audience was clamoring to hear the just-released "Hello, Dolly!," but neither Armstrong nor the band really remembered much about this throwaway recording. A copy of the record had to be flown out so they could quickly learn it for the next performance, and Armstrong's impression of the crowd hearing it in a kind of slow-motion orgasm is priceless.
That the audience that wanted so desperately to hear "Hello, Dolly!" and the audience he has just entertained at the Waldorf were largely absent of his long-disappeared black fans �" and as are we at the Geary, he casually notes �" is a matter of considerable pain for Armstrong. Although we don't know exactly who we are, Armstrong is disarmingly open about a life he knows is coming to a close.
Teachout, the theater critic at The Wall Street Journal, wrote a well-received biography of Armstrong in 2009, and he used his trove of knowledge and dramatic license to distill the 90-minute Satchmo at the Waldorf that has played multiple cities since 2012 with John Douglas Thompson as its star under Gordon Edelstein's simple and effective direction. While it's mostly Armstrong who holds forth in the dressing room, a change in lighting indicates when one of two other characters is talking to us. Most often, it is his longtime manager and mentor Joe Glaser, who ran Armstrong's career from 1935 until Glaser's death in 1969. Glaser was white, necessarily comfy with the mob in the partnership's early years, and knew the marketplace.
By the point Glaser makes his first appearance, we are fully invested in Thompson's performance as Satchmo, not exactly an impersonation but a presence that feels accurate. It takes a moment to realize that Thompson hasn't just been an amiable Satchmo stand-in, but has been delivering a very considered performance, when he switches to Glaser's persona of a flat-voiced businessman who can make Armstrong feel good while raking in 50% of the proceeds.
And then Thompson becomes an incarnation of a grim Miles Davis, who considers Armstrong to be a grinning relic pandering to the white folks. Teachout doesn't exactly play fair with Davis, providing him with a hateful final speech that was unlikely uttered in any connection to Armstrong, and turns the audience against him and his charges that Armstrong had become an Uncle Tom �" not that that was a concept many of us probably wanted to embrace.
Satchmo professes befuddlement at the notion, repeating over and over that he puts on a happy face in front of audiences because he wants to see a sea of faces smiling back. Not that he's naive about his crossover racial appeal. "Every white man in the world got at least one nigger they like," he says, and he's happy to often be that one. But even when his memories move to their darkest places �" betrayals, segregation, ex-wives �" it never seems a scary contradiction of the public Armstrong in how Teachout crafts and Thompson performs the material. This Satchmo can throw around "motherfuckers" and still claim "What a Wonderful World" as his favorite song.
Satchmo at the Waldorf will run through Feb. 7 at the Geary Theater. Tickets are $20-$105. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.