Lauren Bacall was a Hollywood icon who was made for the stage. Which this clip, from her hit “Applause” — possibly one of the campiest items on YouTube — makes abundantly clear:
OK, so Bacall can’t really sing, and she certainly can’t dance.
But she looks as if she’s having a blast, and her charisma carries the number. Result: the 1970 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical.
Bacall belonged in New York, because even when she was 19 she looked and sounded older — exactly the kind of sultry, mature presence that’s catnip to theater audiences, since they aren’t afraid of women.
Unsurprisingly, she was in a Broadway ensemble (as Betty Bacall) in 1942’s “Johnny 2×4,” a couple of years before making her film debut. Equally unsurprisingly, she returned to New York when the left coast didn’t give her enough to chew on.
Bacall’s first starring role on Broadway was in the 1959 comedy “Goodbye, Charlie,” in which she played a philandering guy who’s reincarnated as a woman. More successful was her run as the spinster assistant to a womanizing dentist in the 1965 Broadway version of the French sex farce “Cactus Flower.”
That she scored her two Tonys for musicals will surprise only those who’ve never seen a tuner live: Presence and salesmanship count for a lot, and Bacall had plenty of both.
Ten years after “Applause,” she starred in Kander and Ebb’s “Woman of the Year,” based on a Hepburn/Tracy movie.
And yet again, the runaway excerpt featured her surrounded by adoring chorus boys.
But Bacall wasn’t just drawn to the Broadway lights: She was a trouper who toured America with “Wonderful Town” in the late ’70s, then took Tennessee Williams’ demanding “Sweet Bird of Youth” all the way to England and Australia a decade later.
Bacall could be a sexy, sophisticated siren in Hollywood, but on stage the Bronx broad always hovered close to the surface — which made watching her all the more fun.