As Debbie Reynolds, 77, speed-rapped, did celebrity impersonations and sang (sort of) at Wednesdays opening-night performance of Debbie Reynolds: An Evening of Music and Comedy at the Caf Carlyle, you had the sense of a performer who gave up trying to make sense of it all ages ago. Why bother, if it doesnt mean anything?
In her version of the Sondheim show business survival anthem, Im Still Here, near the beginning of the show, the customary attitude of embattled determination taken by singers was replaced by amazement at the fact that she is actually alive.
What a relief it must have been at some point for Ms. Reynolds to forsake caution, give up trying to protect an image that was phony to begin with and mouth off. As she cataloged her failed marriages and her stupid hits like Aba Daba Honeymoon and asked younger members of the audience, Do you know who I am?, the indefatigable cheeriness that has always been one of her charms was tinged with disgust.
Im really a vaudevillian, Ms. Reynolds announced, adding that she is on the road 42 weeks a year. Wearing a green sequined dress with gaudy gold trim, she was every inch an old-time trouper in the Sophie Tucker tradition, weather-beaten but still tramping the boards. Even when she wobbled through her one big hit, Tammy, at the end of the evening, her movie-studio-cultivated image as Americas 1950s sweetheart was still only a distant memory.
Ms. Reynoldss acute sense of the ridiculous must run in the blood. A similarly unguarded candor and sarcasm characterize the television and stage appearances of her daughter, Carrie Fisher. But as Ms. Reynolds poured out impressions and memories, her motor-mouthed stream of consciousness was faster and less epigrammatic than Ms. Fishers.
