Carol Channing is not just a star shes a supernova.
For 90 glorious minutes, she lit up the stage at the Bromeley
Theater at Blasidell Hall Friday night with her one-woman show, The
First Eighty Years are the Hardest, as only a star of her magnitude
could do.
The Broadway legend closed out the 2005-06 Bradford Creative and
Performing Arts season in a show presented by the University of
Pittsburgh at Bradford and W.R. Case & Sons Cutlery Co.
For 27 years, Ive worked with some divas, BCPAC President Jim
Guelfi said in announcing the legend, but none of them have been so
generous, so kind, so gracious to so many as this great lady of the
American stage.
With the first glimpse of Channings dollop of whipped cream hair
and her high-wattage smile, the audience was smitten.
Hello, Bradford, she said in her distinctively raspy voice.
Resplendent in a red tuxedo suit with a red turtleneck sprinkled
with rhinestones, Channing held up a sweatshirt with Bradford
inscribed on it a gift from Joe Brauser, she said.
She met Brauser and others in her walks through Bradfords Main
Street the past few days, she said, greeting people and thoroughly
enjoying the town.
I walked by the fire department and they all said welcome to me,
she said. I went to Zippo isnt that a fabulous place? They gave me
lighters and other things to burn down the house with.
She then launched into her act, a monologue spiced with songs
about some of the highlights of a career that has spanned six
decades.
My parents wouldnt let me go into theater until I went to
college, she said. So she went to Bennington College in Vermont, a
progressive school, she noted.
The ratio of women to men was 30 to 1 at Bennington, so the
women had to be very progressive, she said.
My first starring part on Broadway was playing Lorelei Lee in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she said. She delighted the crowd with
her rendition of Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend which she termed
her Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Channing accented each carefully enunciated lyric of the most
famous ode to ice with a few bumps and grinds and even an
impressive leg kick for a woman of 85 years.
The audience responded with laughter and rounds of applause,
clearly enjoying their time with this satirical chanteuse, as one
reviewer had termed her.
She recounted memories of her stints on Broadway with three
smash hits, including her most famous, Hello, Dolly.
Im still in love with Dolly, she said.
Aglow in a spotlight, Channing talked about finding the essence
of Dollys character. She launched into a poignant soliloquy from
the play in which Dolly decides to abandon mourning her late
husband and rejoin the human race.
With that, she sang Before the Parade Passes By in her deep,
rich vibrato, her long, lithe arms dramatically outstretched.
Speaking of that voice, she related a story about one of her
co-stars in Dolly, the legendary but equally gravel-toned Louis
Armstrong.
I asked him if he thought I was up to singing the score of Hello
Dolly, she said. Louis said to me, Girl, you can do it. Your voice
is as good as mine!
Clearly, her time appearing in Hello Dolly supplied the most
memorable moments of her show. She delighted the rapt crowd with
tales of her bad habit of falling into the orchestra pit due to her
near-sightedness on many a performance (I usually fell on the
drums. I tried to hit the string section once, but it was a bad
idea.).
She said her proudest moment in show business was when
Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children came to see her in the
show, their first public appearance a year after President Kennedy
had been assassinated.
The local audience then joined her in singing Hello Dolly,
before she introduced her husband of three years, Harry Kullijian,
whom she first met in school in 1933. Together, she and her husband
did a soft-shoe to Tea for Two.
Channing closed and stopped the show with Razzle Dazzle from the
Broadway play and musical Chicago, then took a few questions from
the audience.
Bradford has been so kind to us, Kullijian said. Well never
forget real people, and you are real people.
