 | | | Thursday, August 17, 2006
ACT II SCENE I
ACT II SCENE III
Jerry Lee Lewis
Othello
Unreleased c. 1968
Here's Jerry Lee Lewis's Iago, which comes to us courtesy of a Rock and Roll Othello Jack Good dreamt up after seeing Lewis in 1958, and finally staged a decade later. The relevant passage from Nick Tosches's terrific Hellfire:Good and the rest of the crew were surprised to discover that Jerry Lee was the only actor who knew all his lines at the first rehearsal. "I never thought there was so many words," Jerry Lee later told a Los Angeles Times reporter. "This Shakespeare was really somethin'. I wonder what he woulda thought of my records."
On opening night, and on every night following, Jerry Lee stole the show. He prowled the stage, speaking Shakespeare's poetry in perfect meter, but with no concern to conceal or even to temper his own Louisiana accent. The bright green-and-gold grand piano stood onstage throughout the play, and Jerry Lee not only sat at it to pump the songs that Ray Pohlman had written for him and for the seventeen-piece orchestra in the pit, but also to rake and hammer and tinkle in punctuation of his spoken lines, the most evil of Shakespeare's imaginings. (He fooled with the lines occasionally, as on two evenings, coming upon the corpse of Roderigo in Act V, he howled "Great balls of fire! My friend, Roderigo!")
Theatre critics did not respond very favorably to the show, but most of them expressed praise, even awe for Jerry Lee's virtuoso performance. The Christian Science Monitor called him a "Louisiana-born genius" and a "unique Iago." The critic for theToronto Daily Star, before going on to damn the show, wrote that "Jerry Lee Lewis is genuinely diabolical as Iago. It is astonishing what new implications of evil he can find in words as simple as 'Go to, very well, go to.' Word spread and the theatre filled, night after night, with those eager to witness this wild, redneck Iago, this man, banished ten years ago, barely remembered, now bearing fire anew, hissing at them in unforgiving wrath.... According to Tosches, Lewis identified completely, and sprinkled Iago's monologues in among his encores for years to come. America's Klaus Kinski, on Jesus tour.
NB: Here's what JLL had to say about life on his great-grandaddy's plantation: "He'd take his fist, hit a horse, knock that horse to his knees. A hell of a man, Old Man Lewis. Then they turned all the slaves loose."
NRBQ: A few more tracks. First, a little argument JLL and Sam Phillips had, a minute or two before recording "Great Balls of Fire." Next, an old favorite from the latter-day Sun sessions. And, finally, two songs from Lewis's performance/public exorcism at Hamburg's Star Club, c. 1964 - though for all I know (and you'll read different in the comments, below), he played like this every night.... |
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