Elysa Gardner

Laurence Maslon, who wrote the 2017 documentary “Sammy Davis, Jr: I’ve Gotta Be Me," which had its premiere on PBS’s “American Masters” this week, remembered coming across a 1968 Mad Magazine satire on racial stereotypes that said three black individuals could equal an “emerging African nation” — but it would take four to represent Davis alone.

Maslon, now the artistic director and writer of “Yes I Can: The Sammy Davis Jr. Songbook,” running Feb. 23-25 at the 92nd Street Y as part of its “Lyrics &amp; Lyricists” series, mentioned this to the show’s director, Tazewell Thompson, during a rehearsal break last weekend. Thompson ventured, “It would take at least four people — or 14, or 40” to match Davis, who died in 1990 at 64, of throat cancer.

For “Yes I Can,” Maslon and Thompson settled for three: Jared Grimes, who dances and choreographs Davis’ steps, and also sings; Max Kumangai, who conjures Davis’ vocal skills and dances; and Harriett D. Foy, a woman, cast as the “more mature, soulful” Davis, as Maslon put it, noting, “There was something androgynous about Sammy.” Matthew Saldivar plays mentor figures (Frank Sinatra, Steve Lawrence and Eddie Cantor); Betsy Wolfe juggles Davis’ female muses (Broadway stars Janis Paige and Paula Wayne and Davis’ wife, May Britt).

Once rehearsal resumed, the cast ran through part of the prologue, in which Davis describes the exhausting toll of his Broadway debut, in “Golden Boy,” a musical adaptation of the Clifford Odets play that cast him as a black boxer who falls in love with a white woman. “Can I be what I wanna be?” Foy rapped, to which Wolfe and Saldivar responded, chanting, “Yes you can!”

In truth, success and self-actualization did not come easily to Davis, who started out as a prodigy in vaudeville. For many below a certain age, he’s remembered as a bejeweled fixture on variety and talk shows, or as the one black member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack — and as such the butt of jokes that would start an instant firestorm on social media today.

But in addition to the many hats he juggled as an entertainer — song and dance man, actor, impressionist, raconteur — Davis became a civil rights activist. He befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and took part in the 1963 March on Washington and the “Stars for Freedom” rally during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery — even if some of Davis’ later actions, like expressing support for President Richard Nixon or performing for troops in Vietnam, stumped younger, more progressive admirers.

Maslon conceived “Yes I Can” — the title of Davis’ 1965 autobiography, and of a song cut from “Golden Boy” — as a companion piece to the documentary. “Because we covered so much of his life and the political stuff, the performance aspect got a little attenuated,” he said. “This show is mostly a celebration of his life through song.”

The car accident that cost Davis an eye, and informed his conversion to Judaism, is not addressed in the 92nd Street Y show, for instance. “Because it was through song that Sammy expressed himself, really,” Maslon added.

Thompson recalled gaining affection for Davis while in high school, living with his grandmother. “I remember her saying that Sammy Davis Jr. and Mickey Rooney were the two performers who could do anything,” he said. “But she said Mickey was the one who got all the breaks; Sammy had to keep proving himself and struggling. That’s why she forgave him when he hugged Nixon. She understood. She said, ‘The man just wants to be accepted.'”

Grimes, at 35 a millennial who grew up watching Davis in old movies and performance clips, has a similar perspective. “I had an extensive conversation with Wynton Marsalis years ago, and until then I didn’t know how tough or complex Sammy’s journey was,” he said. “There were people who wanted him to fight and people who wanted him to make or at least seek peace. And he desperately wanted to please everybody.”

Thompson figured: “The timing of his life was off. If Sammy were alive today, he would be the greatest star in the world — we would have caught up with him.”

He didn’t, Maslon said, “live long enough to do a ‘Duets’ album like Sinatra or Tony Bennett, or sing with Lady Gaga. Would Sammy Davis be doing a duet with Cardi B if he were alive today? I think he would.”

‘Yes I Can: The Sammy Davis Jr. Songbook’

Saturday through Monday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan; 212-415-5500, 92y.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/arts/music/sammy-davis-jr-documentary-concert.html" id="ae4b86ec-578c-3468-aba1-e23c8301a7bb">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — How many people does it take to summon the multiple talents, decades-spanning career and complicated life of Sammy Davis Jr.?

Sammy Davis Jr.'s Knotty Journey, on Film and in Song

At 86, Chita Rivera has yet to endure that career phase Stephen Sondheim identified in “I’m Still Here” as, “Sorry, I thought you were whoozis/Whatever happened to her?” Heading into an office above Feinstein’s/54 Below, where she was to begin a string of cabaret performances Monday, the musical theater veteran walked with a classical dancer’s line, still suggesting the grace and fire that secured her breakout role as Anita in the original production of “West Side Story,” one of numerous plum parts she has introduced over more than six decades. The most recent — the embittered romantic Claire Zachanassian in “The Visit,” crafted by her frequent collaborators John Kander, Fred Ebb and Terrence McNally — earned Rivera a 10th Tony nomination in 2015.

Rivera will nod to this history, as she has done in previous cabaret and concert performances, at Feinstein’s. “It’s not brand-new, because my life’s not brand-new,” she said of the show. “When you’re lucky enough to have been around when the Fred Ebbs and the John Kanders and the Jerome Robbinses and the Leonard Bernsteins and the Jule Stynes were expressing themselves, and you were in their company, in their stories — then you have something to say. I don’t give myself a lot of credit.”

Ten days before opening, Rivera was still finalizing the set, weighing whether she should reference, in her typically generous between-song patter, a recent bout with bronchitis. “A couple of months ago, I was talking like this,” she said, lowering her already dusky sub-alto to a basso rasp. She’s including at least two numbers from “The Visit,” though that musical — based on a play by Friedrich Durrenmatt, about a woman seeking vengeance on a man who betrayed her decades ago — didn’t enjoy the level of success that greeted her other Kander and Ebb credits, notably “Chicago” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Rivera still believes it could have another life in London, where she performed a pair of concerts this year. “I think that audience would understand a love story that is European, as opposed to a ‘Mary Poppins.’ A story about a woman who enters with an empty casket and leaves with a full one — but it’s all done for love.”

The composer Kander said that his trust in Rivera’s intuition, which had been shared with the lyricist Ebb, who died in 2004, extended to often calling her when they had completed a song, “even when it didn’t involve her.” Kander added, “I think with great theater artists, and this is certainly true with Chita, the longer they perform, the more you see the essence of their talent. It becomes more distilled as the years go by.”

While Kander also praised his friend and colleague’s enduring discipline and focus, Rivera herself insisted she could easily slip “into my lazy mode” while at home outside New York City, where she lives with her daughter Lisa Mordente, two bull mastiffs and a “feral cat.” (“Thank God, she’s not brought me any dead animals,” Rivera said of the cat. “I keep her well fed.”)

“When I’m not doing something regularly — and that to me means working every day — I watch too much television,” Rivera said. The subject of FX’s warts-and-all bio-series “Fosse/Verdon” was raised. Rivera knew and worked with fellow musical star Gwen Verdon and choreographer Bob Fosse, most famously on “Chicago.” Had she been tuning in?

Later, as discussion turned again to the many legends she has collaborated with, she said, “I wanted this to be a good story about Bob and Gwen. They were an amazing couple, and they produced so much wonderful stuff, but today all they want is dirt.”

Rivera is more bullish on, if anxious about, prospects for Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” which is due next year. Admitting she’s “not mad for” the 1961 movie, in which Rita Moreno was cast as Anita, Rivera said of Spielberg, “If there’s anybody that can do it, I believe he can, because he’s always dedicated to doing excellent work. But then, what do you do with Jerome Robbins’ steps?” (The man who conceived the musical and directed and choreographed the original stage production was fired while working on the first film; ballet wunderkind and Tony winner Justin Peck, who worked on the 2018 screen thriller “Red Sparrow,” is choreographing the new one.)

It’s clearly a matter of personal importance for Rivera, whose father was Puerto Rican — and who said she has “never felt as badly about what’s going on in this country as I do right now” — that this particular musical tale, of intolerance and violence and doomed love, all made transcendent through song and dance, be told authentically.

“I know this story from the liver, from the gizzard, from deep inside. It’s a serious story, and a story that still exists. And maybe this wonderful Jewish man can do it,” she said of Spielberg. “Let’s hope — I have goose pimples just thinking about it.”

Chita Rivera: From May 27 to June 4 at Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.

This article originally appeared in <a id="875488d0-64c8-3eeb-a031-b57470198c0e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/arts/music/chita-rivera.html">The New York Times</a>.

Chita Rivera Is Happy to Look Back. But She Never Stops Marching Forward.

NEW YORK — The man, maybe in his early 30s, pretended not to stare at the striking woman who had just stepped into the elevator. She beckoned, teasingly, when he exited — “We’re coming with you” — making him blush like a schoolboy. “Big fan,” he managed before darting off, a star-struck grin on his face.

Chita Rivera is happy to look back, but she never stops marching forward

<h1>NEW YORK — Perched on a stool on the stage of Feinstein’s/54 Below, Charles Busch eased into the first bars of Diana Ross’ torchy 1973 hit “Touch Me in the Morning,” his voice soft and husky, his delivery relaxed but rueful. Busch became freshly enamored of the ballad after catching a YouTube audio clip of Peggy Lee singing it to a London audience as “this morose, tragic self-indictment,” he said admiringly. But when Busch performs it in his new show “Native New Yorker,” which opened Wednesday at the cabaret club, he won’t necessarily channel Lee or Ross — at least, not in the way he might have in the past.</h1>

As an actor and writer, Busch is among the most prolific and influential drag artists of his generation, giving us memorable women (and men) in solo performance, and in plays and films such as “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” “Psycho Beach Party,” “Die Mommie Die” and “The Divine Sister.” Busch crafted genre parodies that transcended camp in their fantastical elements and their abiding affection for the classic films and grandes dames who inspired him. But in cabaret, a form Busch has dipped into at various points with his musical director, Tom Judson, he began to question his approach.

“I started doing it in drag because that’s how people know me,” said Busch, also known by Broadway audiences for writing the Tony-nominated hit “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.” “But I don’t have a drag persona like, say, RuPaul. I’d come here to 54 Below and they’d say, ‘Charles Busch!’ — and I’d come out looking like Arlene Dahl, then tell true stories about my life.” Starting about a year and a half ago, he thought, “Cabaret is about being real, and I’ve got to see what it’s like stripping off the veil.”

The progression was part of a process that started six or seven years back, and coincided with “this terrible period of dissatisfaction and brutal self-assessment,” Busch said. “I’m normally a very resilient person, but I was in a bad mood for about a year and a half, feeling disappointed in my creative life.”

In response, Busch “called in the Marines” — and rang a therapist he hadn’t seen in years. Later, “I took the radical move of actually taking some singing lessons. And you know, they work. I’d always approached songs as monologues, where it’s about the lyrics, and the melodies are Tom’s job,” he said. “I’ve had to learn that the composer also has something to offer, that the melody is also useful as a form of emotional expression.”

In his last cabaret show, “My Kinda ‘60s,” Busch looked back on his childhood and adolescence, paying homage to the aunt who raised him after his mother died. “Native New Yorker” features music from the following decade, “an interesting and sexy period for me, going from college to figuring out how I’ll somehow earn a living in theater and be true to who I am,” he said. The songs are culled from pop, film and Broadway, veering from Stephen Sondheim (“Pretty Woman,” “In Buddy’s Eyes”) to Henry Mancini (“Whistling Away the Dark”) to Rupert Holmes (“Widescreen”) and Jim Croce (“I Got a Name”).

To develop his non-drag sartorial style, Busch, who describes himself as a “pretty conservative” dresser offstage, went back to his East Village roots and booked a show at the club Pangea in 2017. “I just wore a black shirt and black pants, and it felt great. Then I thought, am I so lacking in imagination in this gender-fluid age that I’m either in full drag or dressed as a waiter? So I had this young costume designer, Jimmy Johansmeyer, make me this man’s suit, a green paisley thing with rhinestone buttons. I would say it’s the place where Bruno Mars meets Judy at the Palace. There’s a place, you know?”

Busch credits his longtime friend Julie Halston, a collaborator and muse in his earlier work, with helping him enter this next phase. “As people get older, there’s a lot more to deal with, and I think Charles has gotten more open to the idea that life is very big,” Halston said. Busch has also seen his impact on younger boundary-pushing artists, such as Pulitzer Prize finalist Taylor Mac, whose own Broadway debut as a playwright, “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” is set to begin previews in April.

“I guess I’ve given a boost to people, like Charles Ludlam did for me,” Busch said, noting that he was greatly moved when Jim Parsons cited Busch as a key influence in a Playbill article about last year’s revival of “The Boys in the Band.” But Busch added, “I think where drag is going right now is more outrageous, more in your face. For my generation, the word ‘drag queen’ was a slur on our professionalism. It’s so totally different today; younger performers — Jinkx Monsoon, Bianca Del Rio, Peppermint — honor that word, and have personae they can stay true to, and I think that’s fabulous.”

And Busch has no plans to abandon drag in his primary vehicle for it, theater. Next January, Primary Stages will present his latest play, “The Confession of Lily Dare,” in which he’ll portray — as he did last year, in a staging at Theater for the New City — the titular heroine as she evolves, over decades, from a convent girl to a cabaret chanteuse to the madam of a string of brothels. “I wanted to see if we could have outrageous fun with these old movie conventions — the gauzy 1930s mother-love dramas — and get a sophisticated, ironic 2018 audience to be genuinely emotionally affected. And we really did it.”

In “Native New Yorker,” Busch will again nod to the real “embattled woman” who stuck with him through the decade of struggle and adventure traced in the show, which ends with the 1985 off-Broadway opening of “Vampire Lesbians.” For “I Got a Name,” he took the unusual step of revising a lyric: “I sing, ‘And I carry it with me for my aunt to see,'” Busch said, then paused because he was getting choked up. “I was very fortunate to have someone who was always on my side,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate in every way.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="a8ce7f6f-72c1-40d2-8af5-63a34b1b864c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/arts/music/charles-busch-native-new-yorker-cabaret.html">The New York Times</a>.

Charles Busch's New Phase Isn't Drag. It's Green Paisley.

As an actor and writer, Busch is among the most prolific and influential drag artists of his generation, giving us memorable women (and men) in solo performance.

Charles Busch's new phase isn't drag, it's green paisley

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Elysa Gardner

Articles written by the author

Sammy Davis Jr.'s Knotty Journey, on Film and in Song

Chita Rivera is happy to look back, but she never stops marching forward

Charles Busch's new phase isn't drag, it's green paisley