Review: L. Peter Callender delivers tour de force in ‘Satchmo’

When it comes to “Satchmo,” aka Louis Armstrong, one of the preeminent pillars of American jazz, there is a radiance to hearing how he felt about some of his most famous tunes.

Take “Hello Dolly” for example. His deliciously gritty and grainy vocal register enters the recording immediately, with a poppy ebullience that ended up knocking four lads from Liverpool off the top of the charts in the mid-1960s.

Satchmo has a different take on the ditty’s greatness, however. “Dolly ain’t much of a song,” Armstrong declares during the solo show “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” now playing at San Jose Stage. “Tell you the truth, it’s a piece of s***.”

It is the bluntness, honesty and heavily salted language that makes “Satchmo” such a marvel. The production, directed with scorching honesty by Ted Lange, does not shy away from the hardened heart of Louis Armstrong, a man who faced blistering racism for years, his body betraying him later on. That’s not to speak of those whom he believed were friends — white folks who knew Satchmo was good for business but couldn’t be bothered to invite him for a meal at their homes.

What is striking is how the erudition of the late playwright Terry Teachout permeates the narrative. An Armstrong biographer, he describes his play as “a work of fiction, based freely on fact.”

Of all the facts expressed, one races to the top of the heap: The masterful, perspicacious work of L. Peter Callender as he navigates three distinct characters in “Satchmo” is an absolute storm of joy, anger, heartbreak and betrayal. These dramatizations are a series of brilliant yet brutal “Et tu, brutes” as Satchmo faces his mortality head on, alone in his dressing room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in March, 1971, the last place Armstrong performed in public before his death four months later.

Callender’s performance is not relegated to one man alone. His transition into the trumpeter’s complicated manager Joe Glaser, the former boxing promoter who gave it all away to focus full-time on Armstrong is buttery-smooth, bouncing between the low-register of melancholia to a pip-squeaky fast-talker and back again. And there is the intermittent entrance of Miles Davis, a sliver of East Coast cool and one who piles onto the perception of Armstrong as an “Uncle Tom,” who takes advantage of a fantastic opportunity to rankle the older jazz man with reckless abandon.

The script does much to challenge Armstrong’s reputation which followed him for years, borne from the musician’s wide grin and a plethora of performances to solely white audiences. The narrative makes clear as day that these notions fueled his insecurities and anger. In one instance, his attempt to call out Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus in 1957 for is defiance of a Supreme Court order to desegregate schools was softened by a reporter. “Uneducated plowboy” certainly did not carry the same weight as the crudeness of what Armstrong actually said.

Callender’s understanding of each critical moment, the power of a well-timed beat, and willingness to grind through the weight of Armstrong’s life comes off as intuitional. His performance is chameleonic, but not in a way that gives you simply an impression or the gist. His portrayal is built from the inside out; he advocates for every heartache imbued in each magical note from Armstrong’s voice or music. Callender understands what it means to be someone’s vessel that allows for living and breathing.