By Marilyn Lester***It’s not unusual for artists to promote their shows with the phrase, “back by popular demand.” In Julie Halston’s case, that statement—and title of her show—is pretty much true. The Tony-winning actress-comedienne has long been a popular, sought-after talent, and in this Birdland Jazz Club appearance, in front of an eager, sold-out audience, Halston gamely and hilariously took on the state of the world as well as the state of her life.
Thematically, she declared it’s a crazy world we now inhabit. That might normally be a depressing bit of news, but who else could make our relative doom so comical? Halston is old-school funny, but she’s good at what she does and the laughs prove it. Starting with a reflection on the pandemic lockdown, which she said, feels like 400 years ago, we were reminded of the ways we sought to cope, like the 7 PM pot banging, noise-making ritual we engaged in. That bit segued into the 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens, about the eccentric Beales, Edith and her daughter, Little Edie—who, Halston declared, would make an excellent Lady Macbeth on the stage.
A hallmark of great comics is the facility with which they can seamlessly transition from one subject to another. Along this journey of popping thematic balloons, Halston arrived at her Catholic upbringing, namely her First Holy Communion at age seven, which, especially for girls (it’s about the dress!) is a Big Deal. Preparing for this momentous event entails study of The Catechism, from which she read; that edition of the book in that day and age proved a gold mine of hilarity in Halston’s hands. Among the quotes she delivered was the cheerful news that “all who die in mortal sin go to hell for all eternity.” You can probably guess what goes on there, and yes, it does include fire and torture.
Comic interpretive reading is a specialty of Halston’s and when it came to a segment about the June 2022 wedding of PJ Magerko-Liquorice and Jordan Millington-Liquorice, laughs were off the scale. It was an affair in which the grooms embraced “Rainbows, Drag and The WIzard of Oz,” according to the New York Times reportage of the union. Halston made a meal of this one, getting to the punchline that “Deepak Chopra (in a white suit embroidered with constellations that were in the night sky when PJ and Jordan met) officiated the ceremony.”
And so it went, with Halston flying through a number of topics, including her beach trip with a new beau (Halston was widowed in 2018) to Sandy Hook, NJ. And wouldn’t you know it, the two wandered inadvertently onto the portion of the National Recreation Area reserved for nude bathers. As for the men there, she observed, it wasn’t a place full of the toned beauties of Fire Island, but of the beer-guzzling truck driver sorts of New Jersey.
True to the cabaret and concert art form, there was an encore—and so another treat of a reading, from a 1994 Ann Landers column entitled “Drug User Relates a Harrowing Tale.” It began, “Please fix up my writing so this letter makes sense. I haven’t slept in 57 hours. I’m 25 and have above-average intelligence. Eight hours after snorting cocaine for two days and doing crystal meth, I went to a tanning salon. I believe I may have suffered some brain damage because it has taken me 45 minutes to write these few lines.” You can’t make this stuff up, so hats off to that very funny girl Julie Halston for ferreting out the odd realities that can make us laugh till it hurts. After all, as the old Reader’s Digest column suggested: “Laughter, The Best Medicine.”
