Louis Armstrong, who always knew how to make an entrance, gets a doozy of an opening scene in “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a one-man show now playing at the Westside Theater. It’s March 1971 and dark as night in the trumpeter and singer’s dressing room at the Waldorf-Astoria, except for a Hopperesque shaft of light streaming through the door. A muffled ovation rises and falls in the distance, and then in he comes, lurching wheezily toward an oxygen tank across the room. Armstrong’s first line, after he has gathered his breath and flicked on the lights, is a blunt, unprintable admission about an accident he’d had in the hotel...
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Watch Billie Holiday perform live in 1958 via YouTube: