‘You’re the nice one!’ her manager reminds her. And she was, too—the jazz diva who didn’t drink, smoke, take drugs or sleep around. That didn’t mean that Ella Fitzgerald had an easy life, however. As another pop star in another musical warns us, ‘You sell a hundred million records, and see how you handle it.’ But the caution that kept this international celebrity on the straight and narrow was rooted in the same insecurities that drove her peers to reckless extremes.
Indeed, the destiny of the 16-year-old child who cooch-danced for small change in front of sportin’ houses might have turned out very differently if her escape from the police one night hadn’t taken her through the stage door of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre on amateur night. After that fortuitous debut, she was hired by her first mentor, bandleader Chick Webb, who taught her the value of self-presentation while manager Moe Gabler guarded her against bad company. During these years she honed her skills at ‘scat-singing’ (in be-bop music, an improvised vocal doggerel employed as a solo turn, its name derived from the word, ‘scatter’). In 1955, she signed with Verve Records under the management of Norman Granz, forging a worldwide career until her death in 1996.
In the musical revue conceived by Rob Ruggiero and Dyke Garrison, we meet Fitzgerald in 1965, just before a concert in France. She has just come from the funeral of her beloved stepsister (a conceit making for additional resonance on the Sunday night that I attended), only to be told by Granz that she must cut one song from the program in order to make room for some ‘patter,’ setting us up for some biographical confessions, along with banter with the band over the proposed excision.
Despite signs of strain on the cold and snowy evening, E. Faye Butler’s voice never faltered over two hours of warbles ranging from Cole Porter and Hoagie Carmichael to such rare classics as the Carter-DePaul-Raye ditty Cow Cow Boogie and Sam Coslow’s Mr. Paganini, backed by a quartet of musicians alert to her slightest nuance, with trumpeter Ron Haynes standing in for Louis Armstrong on a free-wheeling rendition of Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off. However wintry it might be in Skokie, audiences of all ages can warm to le jazz hot at Northlight Theatre.
Playwright: book by Jeffrey Hatcher, music by various artists, conceived by Rob Ruggiero and Dyke Garrison. At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie. Phone: 847-673-6300; $38-$5. Runs through: Jan. 6