Steppin' Out at THE LAURIE BEECHMAN THEATRE
We lose landmarks all the time in this city. I don’t mean lose them to the jackhammers only — though, lord knows, way too many get torn down. I mean landmarks that survive, but still get misplaced. People forget they’re there.
I love lost landmarks. In fact, I collect them — in my head, and my heart. Some are just rooms. Like the Laurie Beechman Theatre, downstairs at the West Bank Cafe on far West 42nd Street off Ninth Avenue, a handsomely-outfitted 80-seat cabaret that is a landmark to the characters who’ve paraded through it; nearly all of them memorable, one way or another.
Starting with Laurie Beechman herself.
I knew Laurie and, boy, I really enjoyed her — a Broadway belter who boasted: “I worship at the altar of Merman,” though she looked more like a Kit Kat Club girl, with jet black hair, gamin-cut, and spiderweb eyes. Laurie had pipes that carried her from the original cast of the original Annie, to a Tony nomination as the narrator in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, to Cats, and what became her signature song, “Memory,” after replacing Betty Buckley as Grizabella herself.
Upstairs at the West Bank after a performance, I would kid Laurie that her Cats makeup was running, and she would grill me, yenta-like, about my dating life, which she judged to be lacking in...commitment. Laurie was married most happily to Neil Mazzella, a former-production carpenter she’d met backstage at Cats, who’d built his business, Hudson Scenic Studios, into Broadway’s go-to set construction company (which it remains to this day). Neil, and all the rest of us, lost Laurie, unbearably, to ovarian cancer in 1998, after a titanic nine-year battle that left her bewigged but unbowed. What had been the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theater Bar was renamed in her memory.
The Laurie Beechman is a noble room like the lady herself, with an all-embracing, wide-open Laurie-like aesthetic, woven from the theatrical neighborhood that surrounds it. Steve Olsen, the West Bank’s longtime owner, has always allowed the space to be whatever it wants to be: a cabaret, of course; a jazz club; a legit theater where innumerable plays and musicals have been worked on (including early workshop rehearsals for Sunday in the Park with George); a distinguished house of Drag; a home base to standup; and on, beyond. In the room’s youth, a young Bruce Willis tended bar down there, and the future King of Comedy, Lewis Black, was resident playwright for years, morphing over time into the joint’s razor-edged MC. Joan Rivers loved the Beechman and actually gave her final performance in it. I once or twice saw Sean Penn in the crowd downstairs, as well as Tennessee Williams, for god’s sake, who lived up-upstairs in Manhattan Plaza, the artists-only apartment complex that rises above the West Bank.
Manhattan Plaza is the place, as you may have heard, where Alicia Keys grew up. The pending arrival of her musical Hell’s Kitchen on Broadway should bring crowds to the West Bank and the Beechman, on pilgrimage. The room has never looked better, but people lost the habit of hanging there, like so many other things lost during the Pandemic.
I ventured back recently for a characteristically uncategorizable show: WHAT I WORE TO WORK, An Illustrated Memoir of Dressing to Undress — conceived by and starring Jo Weldon, a stripper, sex work activist and burlesque historian. Ms. Weldon has impressive charms and enormous burlesque fashion erudition, combined with a Mae West world-weariness drolly suited to her subject. Just now she seems content to style WHAT I WORE TO WORK as a lecture, replete with podium and PowerPoint. I learned a lot, no kidding, but WHAT I WORE TO WORK lacks “Zip,” in the Rodgers and Hart sense — the lyrical zest of that kick-ass Rodgers and Hart Pal Joey song saluting a brainy stripteaser at work.
WHAT I WORE TO WORK will be back at the Beechman on February 23, and again on March 14. If Ms. Weldon were to bring in a director and maybe even a choreographer to whisk her around the Beechman stage, plus lots of music cues to underscore her illuminating and, potentially, exhilarating story, WHAT I WORE TO WORK could be a knockout. In fact, what it really needs is a dose of Laurie Beechman’s “knock your socks off” esprit. Just a little Laurie would certainly warm up this show, or any show, to say nothing of the space that she will always inhabit.