For a one-man play to work, it needs a very, very good script-writer. Back in the early 1990s, I saw Patrick Stewart’s A Christmas Carol. I would watch Stewart in just about anything, but with Dickens supplying the words, well, it was the best of times.
Ronald Keaton has yet to reach the heights of the great Shakespearian, Starfleet captain, and mutant mentor. But this familiar presence on the Chicago stage and quite a bit more besides (manager, director, playwright, fund-raiser, composer, singer) often turned to the best for many of the lines deployed in his single-handed Churchill at New York’s New World Stages. He adapted the script from Churchill’s own words (and from a Reagan-era TV play by James C. Humes, an assiduous laborer in the Churchill mines).
Keaton’s Churchill enjoyed a successful debut in Chicago and moved to New York in February. The setting is the United States in 1946. Churchill is traveling to Fulton, Missouri, to make that speech. Just a year before, British voters had thrown him out of office, scarcely two months after the defeat of Germany. “It may be a blessing in disguise,” soothed Churchill’s wife on Election Day. “Well,” he said, “at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.” That exchange made it into Keaton’s show. The crowd loved it. This Churchill guy has a future on Broadway.
The laughter was