Bea Arthur - Bea Arthur on Broadway - Just Between Friends

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Music reviews of Bea Arthur on Broadway - Just Between Friends

Music Review: Disappointing Friend
Rating: 2 Stars

The show starts strangely with the long rambling lamb recipe. Then there is the somewhat embarrassing self-aggrandizing reason for doing the show in the first place: "I tell you I simply wanted to see if I had the guts to just come out and be myself" - a curious admission indeed. Even the structure is peculiar: ostensibly a one-woman show, the focus sometimes shifts oddly from the audience, who hasn't yet heard the stories, to the accompanist, who clearly already has:
- "Oh Billy can you imagine the humiliation I felt age 8 answering the phone and hearing 'Good evening, sir, could I speak with the woman of the house.' "
- "Oh My God, Billy, 9 o'clock in the morning she was drinking bourbon." There is also the unfortunately manipulative opening of the second act: "I am having a marvelous time. I hope you are too."

The discomfort continues with her effusive descriptions her professional friends and colleagues:
- "This gorgeous hunk of man over here, this is the divine Billy Goldenberg" (her accompanist, composer of "Queen of the Stardust Ballroom" and "Harold and Maude")
- "My darling Norman Lear . . . we became very close friends"
- of Tallulah Bankhead: "Another fabulous fabulous actress . . . She was something fabulous. This brilliant American actress who introduced the word "darling" into the American lexicon. Oh God I adored her, adored her, she was the epitome of glamour and sophistication"
- "Dear dear friend, a very famous female impersonator, Charles Pierce"
- of Lotte Lenya: "All my professional life I've been so lucky to work with so many FABULOUS fabulous women"
-of Jerome Robbins: "I mean, the man was a genius, GENIUS, I mean you talk about a gift from God"
- "My dear friend Angela Lansbury . We had done 'Mame' together on Broadway and we became very very very close friends. But I will never forget when I first met her. I was in awe, in AWE, I mean here was this gorgeous, tall, patrician beauty, you know, classically trained actress, star of stage and screen. "

This artificiality is made more painful by the irony resulting from what she goes on to say about all these darling, dear, gifted, fabulous people. It's uniformly insulting. The "gift from God" was not a nice man. Her "very very close friend" has a "mouth like a longshoreman" and it's only Lansbury's "very close friends know her for the lowbrow raunchy bawdy lady that she really is." There's a short earthy story about Lotte Lenya and a longer one about questionable sexuality with some very vulgar language ascribed to Tallulah Bankhead. Perhaps the point was to debunk the myths, but it only comes across as mean-spirited. Is Bea Arthur really Maude Findlay after all?

Bea Arthur claims that these are "stories that I've saved up over the years that mean a lot to me." Oh surely not! Over 50 years she must have been part of stories that mean a lot more, stories far more interesting of the theater and more revealing of herself. If only she had shared them. And that is the greatest disappointment: Ms. Arthur reveals nothing of her challenges and triumphs. At the end of the evening, we know no more about her than we did at the beginning. Lamb leftovers.

Bea Arthur can indeed sing, however, and she sings exactly as Lucy Brown, Vera Charles, Maude Findlay, or Dorothy Zbornak would be expected to sing. Coleman's "Isn't He Adorable," Weill's "Pirate Jenny," and especially Berlin's "Let's Face the Music" are all entertaining, although she exaggerates tempo changes too uncomfortably. Regretting she never got the chance to play in "Gypsy," she does "Rose's Turn." And speaking of bawdy, she presents two pretty suggestive numbers herself, "What Can You Get a Nudist for Her Birthday" (with a rather too obvious pause trying to force "muff" to be a double entendre which it clearly isn't) and "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sitting on It," with gusto and obvious pleasure.

For Bea Arthur fans this is required material. Those who enjoyed "Three Penny Opera," "Mame," "Maude," or "Golden Girls" might find it interesting. For the rest, consider "Elaine Stritch At Liberty", a much better theater piece and piece of theater history covering approximately the same time period. And by the time Elaine does sing "I'm Still Here," we've been through it with her, something we never get to share with Bea.

1 CD: 1 hour, 7 minutes

Description of Bea Arthur on Broadway - Just Between Friends

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"I wanted to see if I had the guts to just come and be myself," Arthur says in this performance recorded in front of a live audience in December 2001. Alongside co-creator and pianist Billy Goldenberg, she offers wry and often funny anecdotes about her career and the people she's worked with (Angela Lansbury, Pia Zadora). When she does sing ... well, even decades ago Arthur didn't have a beautiful voice, but she's well-suited to the comedy songs. And her versions of Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny" and Goldenberg's own "Fifty Percent"--while they won't make anyone forget Lotte Lenya or Dorothy Loudon--are effective in their own right. Bea Arthur on Broadway is definitely more Bea than Broadway, but it's a career well worth remembering. --David Horiuchi

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