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Elaine Stritch & Matthew McConaughey, Part 2
When she was not performing her soul out for Austin Cabaret Theatre with a six-piece orchestra, Broadway legend Stritch walked obsessively in the West Campus area, dropped by Starbucks and Eddie V’s, guarded against those diabetic episodes that threaten her everyday peace, and peppered fans with argus-eyed questions about Austin.
Note that date. She has delivered the act hundreds of times since its inception as a collaborative project with The New Yorker critic John Lahr and director George C. Wolfe. In the two-part show, Stritch tells her own rollercoaster story and sings numbers she has performed thousands of times — the first she introduced during the revue “Angel in the Wings” — in 1948! So why the need to rehearse?
“She’s a perfectionist,” Moulton said during a post-show cool-down at Rain on Sunday. “Everything must be just right.”
That, and, as an artist, Stritch has continued to search for meaning in “At Liberty.” Songs, such as “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which she once performed with ferocious acidity, or “I’m Still Here,” which in other hands sounds almost like an anthem, she now delivers with potent helpings of vulnerability and mortality.
Austin audiences embraced Stritch and her still-robust Broadway belt with respect and affection, which Stritch returned in kind. (Moulton reports that she reserved the highest praise for them: “They get it. They get it!”)
Yes, we got it. And, into her ninth decade, Stritch’s star has never hung higher.
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