At Liberty

Disc 1
1	There's No Business Like Show Business 5:56
2	Caca 2:13
3	I Want a Long Time Daddy 2:17
4	A Piece of Mahler 1:49
5	This Is All Very New to Me 2:11
6	Going to New York 2:09
7	Marlon Brando 6:36
8	Broadway Baby 3:50
9	My First Broadway Show 2:15
10	Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo) 2:31
11	Ethel Merman 0:45
12	Can You Use Any Money Today? 2:33
13	Pal Joey 5:05
14	Zip 7:04
15	Ben Gazzara 3:44
16	Noël Coward 3:30
17	Why Do the Wrong People Travel 6:39
18	Richard Burton 2:11
19	But Not for Me/If Love Were All 5:25
Disc 2
1	I'm Still Here 7:05
2	Booze 7:37
3	The Little Things You Do Together 5:33
4	The Ladies Who Lunch 5:00
5	John Bay 2:52
6	There Was Never a Baby Like My Baby 2:42
7	I've Been to a Marvelous Party 0:31
8	God So Quickly 5:08
9	The Party's Over 1:23
10	Absent Almost Always 6:57
11	Something Good 2:42

Barnes & Noble

The one and only Elaine Stritch is a living legend, no doubt about it. A Broadway staple for five-plus decades, Stritch has seen all there is to see and is ready to talk and sing about it. And that’s precisely what she does in her hit one-woman show, captured on this vibrant live recording. The stories are both poignant and wrenching in their honesty -- this grande dame takes no prisoners. No one can put over a song like this trouper, either; her signature item from Stephen Sondheim’s Company, “Ladies Who Lunch,” still retains its wit and wisdom, while Sondheim’s masterpiece from Follies,“I’m Still Here,” is a triumphant highlight. Strich also puts her special spin on standards including a medley of “But Not for Me/If Love Were All” and the great ballad “The Party’s Over.” Lesser-known tunes like “Why Do All the Wrong People Travel” and “There’s Never Been a Baby like My Baby” are also given the Stritch touch, effectively turning them into mini-masterpieces. Nothing can take the place of catching Stritch on stage, but this sparkling document comes close. William Pearl

All Music Guide

Veteran actress/singer Elaine Stritch had a career in musicals, straight plays, movies, and TV dating back to the mid-'40s, and at age 76 she reviews it all on this two-CD album, which is a recorded version of her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. Her singing voice has long since become raspy and limited, but her timing and phrasing enable her to put across almost any song effectively. She features her signature songs, from "Civilization" (the novelty in which a monkey expresses a preference for the jungle), which she sang in her first Broadway show, Angel in the Wings, in 1947, to Noël Coward's witty "Why Do the Wrong People Travel," which she introduced in Sail Away in 1961, and, inevitably, "The Ladies Who Lunch," her showstopper from Stephen Sondheim's Company in 1970. Other songs tend to be incidental to the anecdotes she tells, starting with an annotated version of "There's No Business Like Show Business," from which she hangs a series of humorous personal observations. Stritch is unsparing to herself as well as her colleagues, providing an impressionistic autobiography that is revealing, if selective. You would hardly know about her extensive work in television, which goes almost unmentioned, but her major theater credits are all touched on. She is unafraid to discuss her problems with alcohol or with men. Containing entertaining stories concerning such figures as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ethel Merman, and Noël Coward, this is an album that will delight anyone interested in the history of theater over the years from the 1940s to the 1980s, as told from the vantage point of one of its more acute, if occasionally addlepated, observers. And though the mere listener is denied the added pleasure of having Stritch on-stage performing it, very little is actually lost in the transfer to disc. William Ruhlmann