Joan Collins hadn’t yet made her entrance to perform One Night with Joan, her ten-night, fourteen-show “cabaret” debut at Feinstein’s Ballroom, and I was already captivated as I had been twenty-eight years before. The screen that was part of her minimalist set on the Feinstein’s stage was a collage of photos from every period of her life and career and the images took me back to the spring of 1982. A publishing company had just hired me to edit a new celebrity newsstand magazine and since the nighttime soap opera Dynasty was the hottest show on TV, I knew its lead star Joan Collins would be on the first cover.

I scoured the company’s massive photo library to research the story and found a huge file of Joan Collins shots going back to her earliest days in films during the 1950s. I immediately fell in love. Joan Collins was clearly one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood history. She was called the “poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor.” If Joan Collins were the consolation prize, I thought at the time, it would be no shame to be poor.

Now seventy-seven, Joan Collins is still gorgeous, still possesses a sophisticated, cheeky sense of humor, and can still be refreshingly self-deprecating when reminiscing about her career, her relationships and her marriages. She can even do a full split and follow it up by joking, “That is what they call the British Open.”

But while her show likely sold out each performance , it did so more on the power of her celebrity than on the strength of the material. Nobody expected Collins to break out in song as in a true cabaret show, but this foray into various aspects of her past could and should have been much more than a monologue filled with vintage film and TV clips as if it were an average episode of TV’s Biography or E! True Hollywood Story. Hearing her dish about her early days in Tinsel Town was amusing, but was it a revelation to learn that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (whom she was named for) were A-list bitches, that Richard Burton would sleep with anything in a skirt, that kissing a pipe-smoking Bing Crosby was like “kissing an ash tray,” that Frank Sinatra (who insisted Collins call him “Francis”) was an obnoxious boor, and that the only way gorgeous creatures like herself and Marilyn Monroe could get roles in good films was to succumb to the casting couch?

There was no mention of her eighteen-month engagement to notorious Hollywood cad Warren Beatty, no insight into men, marriage and relationships after four divorces, and no discussion of what she has learned about herself and her craft after more than five decades in the industry.

While it’s clear Collins will definitely need to recruit a stronger writer and editor (to add more meaningful material and make sure some of the one-liners don’t fall flat) and a new director (who should excise some of the clip montages like the Dynasty outtakes) to tweak this show should she take it on the road, it’s also clear that her beauty, personality and star appeal will bring in audiences no matter what kind of material she delivers. After all, when an audience erupts in applause at the opening bars of the Dynasty theme song, they’re already putty in your hands. When Collins closed the show with a series of one-liners about how women are perceived at various stages of their lives, she characterized a woman past sixtry as being like Africa: “Everyone knows where it is, but nobody wants to go there.” It’s a lot easier to make a joke about that when you know it’s not really true about yourself. When it comes to Joan Collins, no matter what the age, everyone wants to go there.

\Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
November 22, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org