"I AIN'T FRENCH":

At one point during Terry Teachout's play Satchmo at the Waldorf, the character of Louis Armstrong, performed by the accomplished stage and screen actor John Douglas Thompson, talks about his astonishing ability to string together a series of high Cs on his horn. Satchmo adds that, after those high notes, he likes "to take things way back down low, so you know you been somewhere." Something similar is true of Teachout's play. As with the experience of all true art, you know you've been somewhere. [...] Teachout's very risky composition of a one-man play, focusing primarily, of course, on Armstrong but secondarily on Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser, and with brief appearances by Armstrong's musical nemesis, Miles Davis, could have easily faltered in any number of ways. Bad pacing, uneven shifts between characters, or the inability of the actor to sustain a 90-minute series of monologues -- any of these could have derailed the performance.

Happily for viewers, none of these difficulties surface. The script scintillates, and the performance captivates, from start to finish. Above all, theatergoers will discover a very happy coincidence of material and performer, with John Douglas Thompson moving with ease back and forth between the characters, masterfully altering the emotional register -- from anger to sorrow, from desperation to joy -- and keeping the audience entertained throughout. (A lengthy standing ovation followed the performance I attended last weekend in Philadelphia.)

Prompted by a famous photograph of a pensive and weary Armstrong backstage at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1971, just months before his death, Satchmo at the Waldorf is a behind-the-scenes presentation of the life of Louis (pronounced Lewis, not Louie, because, as Armstrong says, "I ain't French. I'm black") Armstrong, the man. As he says early on, "People don't know me; all they know is what they see on TV."

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