Lauren Bacall

I only know her as a film icon, so I was wondering if anyone here saw her on stage and care to share their experience?

Updated On: 5/4/12 at 04:52 PM

Thank you! I like her a lot. She's a wonderful actress with great and unique presence.
Unfortunately, Ms. Bacall is not enjoying great health those days, but I do hope she can recover as fully as possible.

That story, like many involving The Merm, is apocryphal at best.

---

"We didn't discuss you at all Hon!"

---

I saw her in APPLAUSE and she was marvelous. Not the best singer, for sure. But I'll give her credit for this: she sounded exactly the same live as she does on the OBC.

this is the type of crap that is all gossip. What if they we saying this about you? Would you report it?

and what the heck does it mean?

I remember watching her after she made her entrance in "Waiting in the Wings". She sat on a sofa in the center of the stage, delivering a monologue with all the other ladies in the cast watching her and hanging onto every word. In the meantime, Rosemary Harris sat in a rocking chair all the way over on stage left, working on a needlepoint. She just sat there, moving that needle, and stealing the entire scene from Bacall! You couldn't take your eyes off of her. It was a fabulous example of the difference between a screen and a theatre professional.

---

I watched a movie starring Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck, and the great Dolores Gray on TCM earlier this week. It was called DESIGNING WOMAN, which I had never even heard of. It also featured choreographer Jack Cole dancing some of his own choreography. The dances were pretty silly. Bacall and Gray stood out as real pros. Very enjoyable.

---

It's hard to communicate exactly what was so exciting about the way Bacall performed in Applause and Woman of the Year. Her foghorn voice is even hared to explain than Merman's. (At least Merman was a musician.)

But Bacall had glamor, and a flawless sense of comic timing. The bleating of her voice defined character. Or at least it did in those two shows.

"But Alive" from Applause with Harvey Evans and Penny Fuller and a bunch of 1973 chorus boys.

http://youtu.be/a_3gxHeivR0


And here is "The Grass Is Always Greener" from Woman of the Year, with Marilyn Cooper:

http://youtu.be/mQpE15e4Zbo

---

She's one of the girls who's one of the boys.

http://youtu.be/DIuHHALjpVA

Wait for it--that note at the end. It will change your life.

---

Updated On: 5/4/12 at 08:06 AM

I thought she was very good in Waiting in the Wings. Very thoughtul, very much in keeping with the character. Her scene with her son was honest and moving, and she was touching in it. But in her latest autobiography, she expressed unhappiness with the director of the show, so, obviously, it was not a great experience for her.

I concur with all the other posters who thought she was terrific in Cactus Flower, Applause, and Woman of the Year.

"I remember watching her after she made her entrance in "Waiting in the Wings". She sat on a sofa in the center of the stage, delivering a monologue with all the other ladies in the cast watching her and hanging onto every word. In the meantime, Rosemary Harris sat in a rocking chair all the way over on stage left, working on a needlepoint. She just sat there, moving that needle, and stealing the entire scene from Bacall! You couldn't take your eyes off of her. It was a fabulous example of the difference between a screen and a theatre professional."

This is unfair to Bacall.

It's called upstaging. In this case, presumably, scripted by the author.

If you are going to have one character on a sofa, seated before the remainder of the onstage cast save one, and that one is isolated on the other side of the stage, sewing, then your attention is deliberately going to be focused on the other character, and it doesn't matter who's playing the part. Bacall and Harris could have exchanged roles in that scene, and one would have paid attention to the odd-woman-out.

And Bacall wasn't just a screen actress. She was a stage and screen actress.