Stockard Channing: The Lady is a Champ
By Mervyn Rothstein
Channing gets to sing not only one of the best known and greatest Rodgers and Hart songs, but one of the classic songs of all musical-theatre history: "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." Did she find the prospect daunting? No, she says, because Paul Gemignani is her musical director.
"I listened to about 20 renditions of the song that were never in the context of a musical play — Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney — and I realized there's a massive amount of leeway in how you can approach the lyric and the music. I said the task for me is to be able to sing the song that's in my head."
She approached it as if it were a monologue. "It's about Vera's fears, her past, her desires, the joy of being reawakened. I love the context that she's doing it while she's in bed with this guy she's just had sex with, and I love the ambiguous, conflicting feelings she has. The song makes the audience aware of who she is inside. It's a classic monologue, like something out of Shakespeare. Paul said he wanted it to be sung as if people hadn't heard this song before, for people to listen to that lyric and understand the woman singing it, as opposed to it being a 'number.'"
When she is singing, Channing says, she is "riding this raging bull of a song. My job with every phrase is to show exactly what Vera's thinking and hope that the audience will be on the same page. It's a very interesting journey she goes through, from feeling she's on top of this, that she's had this great sexual experience, and then she starts thinking, 'I know what Joey is, what he really is.' And then what happens is that she's alone with herself. She goes for it. She decides to surrender to him, as opposed to just kicking him out in the morning. And she has no idea what lies ahead."
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Stockard Channing and Matthew Risch in Pal Joey
photo by Joan Marcus
