Welcome to Diva Divo Blog!

Welcome to Diva Divo Blog! I'm Dan! I'm a huge fan of all things musical theater, but mainly Golden Age of Broadway musicals and their female stars. I intend for this blog to be a place to celebrate female and male musical theater performers, past and present! Rather than continuing to inundate my Facebook friends with clips, link and anecdotes about these performers, I've decided to dedicate a home to all of my musings.

As a kickoff for the blog, I've just started reading Nothing Like A Dame by Eddie Shapiro. I am dedicating a blog post to each of the amazing female musical theater performers that were interviewed and included in this book. First up, Elaine Stritch. The late, great Elaine Stritch.

My first time seeing Elaine perform live was in 1994, in the pre-Broadway Toronto production of Show Boat. I normally think of that production as the first "Broadway" musical that I saw. To see Elaine Stritch and Robert Morse, two musical theater legends performing opposite one another, was incredible. There isn't a whole lot of footage available online of this production, but I am including a link to Elaine's wonderful, albeit brief, performance on the 1995 Tony Awards.

I so regret the fact that I missed Elaine's performance as Jeanette in The Full Monty at the Paper Mill Playhouse. I have looked and looked for footage of this performance online to no avail.

One thing that I did learn from Nothing Like A Dame is that Elaine performed in the national tour of Mame (one of my all-time favorite musicals) before doing Company on Broadway. Another fun fact from the book: that she played both Mame and Vera on tour, and that ultimately she liked playing Vera more than Mame. In her words,

"I did that for a year. That was just to be active and make money because I didn't get much of a kick playing Mame. It's a lot of costume changes. It doesn't pay off. It's about the costumes, you know?"

Interestingly, when I asked Christine Ebersole at a talkback with Michael Riedel if she would ever be interested in doing a Broadway revival of Mame, she answered similarly. (Christine Ebersole did a production of Mame as Mame at Paper Mill in 1999 with Kelly Bishop as Vera, but Ebersole performed Vera in 2004 at the Hollywood Bowl opposite Michele Lee as Mame.) Ebersole basically said that Mame was a very difficult role with many costume changes, but that she would much rather be Vera in a Broadway revival.

Elaine Stritch told a funny story at her closing engagement at the Carlyle in New York involving Judy Garland and Mame. Basically, the idea was that they could go out touring together in Mame, and each night they could trade parts as Vera and Mame. The reason was simple. The person playing Mame could go out after the show, drink and party, and only have to do Vera the next night. But the punchline of the story was Judy's line, "But, Elaine...what about matinées?"

The last time that I saw Elaine perform live in New York was at a talkback with Michael Musto and Chiemi Karasawa at the 92nd St. Y when she was back in New York after moving to Michigan to promote her movie, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. One of the Elaine quotes that I remember from that evening was, "I'd rather be dead than fat." Here is a great highlight reel of that event:

I am only one chapter (interview) into Nothing Like A Dame and I love the book and highly recommend it. Thank you for reading my blog post!

If you would like to buy this book on Amazon, here is a link to purchase the book: Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater

#ElaineStritch #Diva #MusicalTheater