“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
Thus spoke Asa Yoelson—better known to the world as Al Jolson—so resoundingly it became his catch phrase, trademark and battle cry all rolled into one. Those five simple words came to symbolize Jolson’s powerful performing style in the same way that “Come up and see me sometime” told moviegoers to the early talkies that Mae West was on the prowl.
Mike Burstyn, Photo by Kit Productions
Now two theater artists, Mike Burstyn and Bill Castellino, are bringing Jolson at the Winter Garden to NoHo’s El Portal Theatre for a three-week engagement opening Sept. 6.
Eight days before opening, we are convened at Madilyn Clark Studios for an interview, an hour before Burstyn goes into a brush-up rehearsal for the show. The occasion brings Jolson’s catch phrase ironically to life as all of us are not present in the flesh. Castellino, the show’s director, choreographer and co-writer, has been stranded on the East Coast by Hurricane Irene. Burstyn, his writing partner and star of the show, along with publicist Steve Moyer are dialing Castellino and putting him on speakerphone so he can participate.
“Let me paint a picture for you, Bill, what we’re dealing with here,” Burstyn talks into the phone. “We can’t get into the space I rented quite yet because somebody else is in there. So we’re outside in a little courtyard area with a beautiful but loud water fountain just a few feet away and some workers setting up a banquet table in this almost 100 degree heat. We’re going to talk as loud as we can, and we need you to talk loud too so we can hear you. . . .Wait a minute. Hold on. Somebody just started doing some warm-up vocalizations in the studio right next to us. . . .Just stay patient. We’re trying to move and think we’ve just found a vacant indoor space that will work better. . . .Wait. Hold on again. A jet is flying over now, and we can’t hear a thing.”
Seconds later, when the door is closed against the vocalizations and the plane has flown over, Burstyn smiles, “You have to mention all this. It’s gotta be the craziest interview ever.”
Then into the phone: “Bill, are you getting on a plane today?”
Castellino: “Oh yeah. I’m sitting in the Newark airport right now for a flight to Cincinnati and my final connection to LA.”
“Call me when you land tonight, and I’ll have Cyona [his wife] pick you up.”
These two met in 1998 when Burstyn auditioned for Castellino for the American national tour of London’s West End hit Jolson: The Musical.
Burstyn: “Of course you were a big fan of mine already. Right, Bill? No, seriously he was kind enough to cast me in the lead.”
Bill Castellino, Photo by Dan Israely Productions
When suggested that kindness had less to do with the decision than talent, Castellino readily agrees: “We had many serious contenders for the role. Mike brought to it not only a strong connection to the material but to a history of the material as well. He got it on lots of different levels.”
Burstyn: “I started making those connections when I was 11 years old and living in South Africa and a friend came to our house with some Jolson records. I fell in love with that voice and used to sing along with him.”
Castellino: “The same thing with me, but it was my dad’s youngest brother who introduced me to the records. I was already a student of theater. Those records I first heard at Uncle Bob’s made me profoundly connected to the man’s work.”
When quoted the Bob Dylan remark about Jolson as “somebody whose life I can feel”, Burstyn concurs. “So many great stars became Jolson fans. He performed in the days before microphones. They said you could stand at the rear of the theater when he was singing and place your hand on the back wall, and you could feel that wall vibrate from the power of his voice.”
Castellino: “What Jolson did was to take the emerging culture of this country and wed it to the old country he came from [the Russian Empire in what is now Lithuania]. He fused an Old World passion to a New World rawness. He was the first to put these two styles together and not just in a big, broad belting kind of way. He also was quite effective in those tenderest moments of ballads. He never held back. He was going for it fully wrought with every performance.”
Burstyn: “He encompassed everything in show business, unlike today’s stars who are more specialized. He brought it all together the same way Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis, Jr. later did. We’ve lost a lot of that now.”
Castellino: “I think all the different reality and amateur shows on TV now suggest that an audience is still interested in this kind of formatting. We don’t have as much eclecticism under one roof the way The Ed Sullivan Show did, but that type of entertainment has never gone out of style. In fact it’s exponentially blown out of the water through all the different cable and web outlets. Look at a serious star like Kevin Bacon who also has a rock band. There are lots like him who are not just a one trick pony.”
Mike Burstyn in "Jolson at the Winter Garden"
Burstyn: “We went on the road for 13 months with Jolson: The Musical, so that success speaks for itself. Over the next 10 years various people kept urging us to bring it back or do a follow-up show of some kind. Just last year as we were talking it over, we realized that Jolson died in 1950, which made it 60 years since his passing. The timing seemed right for that next show, but today’s economy wouldn’t allow us to do what we did in ’98-99. That production employed almost 100 people. We had a 30-piece orchestra and 28 performers on stage. Whatever we did we had to simplify. That’s when the idea of more of a concert piece occurred to us. Since Jolson had nine sold-out shows at the Winter Garden, that seemed perfect.”
Castellino: “The tour 10 years ago—12 years ago now—and this show are different and alike. They both present the vocal stylings of Jolson with his signature songs, but that one was a more biographical summing up of his life, whereas this one is a fictional concert at the Winter Garden. It’s not only a concert though. We flesh it out with a number of anecdotes so that a plot unfolds with a surprise at the end.”
Burstyn: “We wanted our audience to experience what it was like to experience a live performance of Jolson himself. He used to perform these Sunday night specials at the Winter Garden so his fellow entertainers could see him when their shows were dark. But we developed this framework around it, so it’s not just a concert. It has this nice surprise that I can’t tell you about without revealing a spoiler.”
Castellino: “Yes, the structure of our piece allows us to talk about something else, to tell another kind of story involving redemption. It’s like the melting pot that was America at that time with the best of different elements coming together to imprint this version of the story we wanted to tell. That’s enough. Like Mike said, any more and we get into spoilers.”
And supplant the surprise. At this moment Castellino begins to sign off from Newark because his boarding call has been announced. Among the flurry of well-wishes for a safe trip and thankfulness for surviving the hurricane, Castellino remarks that “the irony is it’s absolutely perfect weather here right now. There’s puffy white clouds, a beautiful blue sky and a mild temperature. This is after being tied in knots over what was gonna happen.”
After bidding good-bye, Burstyn picks up the Jolson thread. “Al Jolson had something you really can’t put your finger on. It’s like he was the top salesman in the world’s largest supermarket. He once said, ‘Everybody in entertainment is selling the goods, and I’ve got the goods to sell.’ He had the magic like Judy Garland had the magic.”
Laura Hodos, Mike Burstyn, Jackie Bayne and Wayne LeGette
Feats of thaumaturgical legerdemain often result from countless hours of practice, a habit Burstyn shares with his idol. He also has a parental connection to the great man that he never realized he had when he was a youngster. He says, “I was literally born in a trunk because my parents, Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux, were stars of the Yiddish theater. But my father was also a recording star at Columbia Records, the same studio where Jolson worked. And he’d record the same songs Jolson did but in Yiddish.
Burstein was married to another woman before he married Lux, and Burstyn relates a story about his father from that earlier marriage. “One night, he came home and found a note on the table — his first wife left him, saying, ‘I cannot live without my mother.’ She divorced him and took their little boy, who he loved dearly, with her. The very next morning after finding her gone and reading that note he had to go to the studio and record “Sonny Boy.” You can hear his voice breaking with sorrow on that record. To this day I have trouble singing that song without breaking down myself. I can see people in the audience crying. It seems more emotionally moving to men than women.”
Burstyn’s bio outlines how he made his stage debut at the age of three. He fills in the blanks for that outline. “My father was doing a Christmas show in New York—my mother was in it too—when our baby-sitter took me and my twin sister to a matinee. In this show my father disguised himself as a crazy doctor to win the girl. His fellow actors as a joke dressed me in a high hat and some Smith Brothers whiskers in the wings and pushed me onto stage during one of his musical numbers. The audience started laughing. He didn’t know why and thought maybe his fly was down or something. Then the orchestra leader pointed to me on stage left. He stopped his number, walked over to me and started this conversation.
“He said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m Santa Claus.’ ‘Santa Claus! And what are you doing here?’ ‘I wanna sing.’ ‘What would you like to sing?’ I told him [here Burstyn utters an unintelligible string of syllables and explains] It’s a gibberish song he used to sing as part of his act. He told me to sing it. [Burstyn musically renders more gibberish.] The orchestra leader said, ‘You want us to accompany him?’ ‘Sure, sure. Accompany him.’ When I finished, I took a big Shakespearean bow and walked offstage, but the audience kept applauding, so I walked back on and took another bow. I don’t remember this, but my father said a guy in the audience flipped a silver dollar onto stage and said, ‘Keep that little boy. Someday he’s gonna be like his father.’ Yeah, I was three then. A few years later in South Africa when we were seven, my sister and I formally joined the act. We were the Jewish four Cohans. That’s my history.”
Wayne LeGette and Mike Burstyn
His sister Susan didn’t remain in show business. His wife and their two sons never signed up for it, but Burstyn maintains, “I think my granddaughter has the bug. She’s five now, and I think she’s got it. I don’t know if my son knows it yet or not, but I can see it in her from the way she sings and acts out little skits around us.”
Burstyn moves right back to the current show. “We owe so much to [producer] Dan Israely. He found the money, the venue. Without him we’d have nothing.”
Burstyn and Castellino premiered the show at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Jupiter, Florida in February and March of this year and retained their cast of backup singers Jacqueline Bayne, Laura Hodos and Wayne LeGette for the LA premiere. “The biggest compliment I think I’ve ever received,” Burstyn relates, “came from this old gentleman after one of the Jupiter shows who asked our stage manager which recordings I was lip-synching to. When the SM told him I was doing my own singing, he said, ‘Listen, I heard Jolson live and that was Jolson’s voice.’ I’m not trying to do a Jolson imitation. I hope—and I think—I’m channeling Jolson.”
He is certainly conversant with the Jolson career as he recounts, “Jolson was the first singer to sell a million records, the first performer to entertain the troops in World War II—before Bob Hope—the first of course in a full-length talkie. He did 38 performances in one week [for the troops] in Korea and completely wore himself out. You know how he died? He was playing cards with his buddies shortly after his Korean tour when he suddenly said, ‘Boys, I’m going’ and collapsed from a heart attack.
“I can identify with whatever he knew or sensed in that moment. A few years ago I was doing a nightclub act in Tucson and staying at the Hilton Hotel. Late one night I heard a knock on the door. When I opened it, a guy stuck a gun in my face and burst into the room—” [he chuckles and repeats]—“he burst in on Burstyn. Well to make a long story short: he was an escaped convict trying to make his way to the border. He held me at gunpoint about 45 minutes before I managed to talk him down and walked him out the front door of the hotel and put him in a cab. But in that moment the gun was shoved in my face my whole life literally flashed in front of me the way you hear people talking about. Something like that must have happened to him right before that heart attack.”
Burstyn sums up Jolson’s impact with an anecdote about The Jazz Singer: “Georgie Jessel had done the play on Broadway and was considered a shoo-in for the movie. Well, he and Jolson were staying at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood and had made a date to go golfing. Jolson called him about 8 am and told him it was pouring outside and they had to call off the game. Jessel said okay and went back to sleep. Jolson instead went to Warner Brothers. When Jessel later read in Variety that Jolson had gotten the part in the picture, he was livid about it for years. But delivering the eulogy at Jolson’s funeral, Jessel said, ‘Al Jolson was a son of a bitch, but he was the greatest entertainer in the world.’
“Bill and I want to reintroduce the greatest entertainer in the world to a whole new generation with a national tour to major cities. If we can then move it to New York—with perhaps even a limited run at the Winter Garden—that would be a dream come true.”
If Castellino and Burstyn have their way, maybe the rest of us ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
Jolson at the Winter Garden, produced by Dan Israely and Zahava Atzmon. Opens September 8. Tues.-Sat., 8 pm; matinees Wed., Sat. and Sun. 2 pm. Tickets: $35-60. Through Sept. 25. El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood. Call 877-SEE-PLAY (877-733-7529) or visit www.ElPortalTheatre.com
***All Jolson at the Winter Garden photos by Alicia Donelan
