As depicted in “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” Louis Armstrong seems to suffer from multiple-personality disorder: Not only does John Douglas Thompson play the legendary jazz great, but he also voices his Jewish, mobbed-up manager, Joe Glaser, and his young rival, Miles Davis. Despite the resulting focal whiplash, Terry Teachout’s play is a trenchant portrait of the artist, enlivened by Thompson’s brilliant performance.
Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s theater critic, sets the action in 1971, after one of the trumpeter’s final shows at the Waldorf Astoria. Stooped and frail, desperately sucking on an oxygen tank, he’s nonetheless chatty and profane, his exclamations of “Motherf - - ker!” a marked contrast to his genial onstage persona.
Like so many solo portraits, this one-man show has Armstrong addressing theatergoers as if they’d just wandered into his dressing room. Although stilted, it helps convey the horn player’s personality.
And a colorful one it is, starting with his hardscrabble childhood in New Orleans’ Storyville district, the son of a prostitute. Renowned for his groundbreaking style, he became a superstar after Glaser took him under his wing — and made him sing.
“That voice of yours, that’s where the money is,” Glaser says, as Thompson morphs into the fast-talking manager.
Those transitions prove jarring, making us all too aware of the actor’s craft, rather than the characters he’s playing. “Satchmo” is best when it delves into specifics — when Armstrong deconstructs his legendary recording of “West End Blues,” or relates his disdain for the song that pushed The Beatles off the charts. (That song, by the way, was “Hello, Dolly,” and you’ll hear it when you leave the theater.)
Under Gordon Edelstein’s fleet direction, Thompson delivers a convincing approximation of Armstrong’s raspy voice while wisely forgoing a slavish impression. He’s superb — as versatile on the stage as Satchmo was with his horn.