I don't want to suffer for my art, but I'm awfully glad Elaine Stritch did.

If you know much about the American Musical Theater (for some reason, that needs to be Capitalized), you won't need much an introduction to Stritch. Possibly best known for introducing the song "Ladies Who Lunch" in Steven Sondheim's Follies in 1970, Stritch has had a pioneering career in television, movies, and Broadway. It has not been a smooth ride.

Elaine Stritch: At Liberty is some or all of: the world's most tuneful AA testimony, the world's shortest autobiography, or the most focused cabaret acts you'll ever hear. Recorded live over three nights at the end of her cabaret run (it later transferred uptown to Broadway), At Liberty is a harrowing 2-CD musical portrait of a steely talent overcoming a self-destructive streak nearly ˆ but not quite — as strong.

"Remarkable talent, Elaine," she says one of her producers told her one night. "Don't fuck it up."

The show itself consisted of your basic nine-piece pit band and Stritch alone on stage ˆ except for a brilliantly wrought script by John Lahr (son of the actor Burt and a journalist of some repute). There are stories here of growing up impossibly sheltered in Michigan in what must have been the Œ30s, summer stock and a date with Marlon Brando, an engagement with Ben Gazarra, throwing over Gazarra for Rock Hudson, working with Noel Coward, Hal Prince and Steven Sondheim, and and and.

Throughout it all was the fear and the booze. It's entertaining to hear her match the shows she was in with the particular tipple she needed to get through them. It's less entertaining when you realize that she's starting to lose work because of it. And it's not entertaining at all to hear about her nearly fatal diabetic collapse after one or three too many.

But don't forget the songs, not all of which she's sung before, but all of which are brilliantly informed by a Technicolor life nearly thrown away. "I'm Still Here" is brilliant, as you might expect, and so is "Ladies Who Lunch." A medley of "But Not for Me" and "If Love Were All" is a heartbreaking first-act closer. And her interpretation of two Noel Coward songs is a revelation.

I would not want Elaine Stritch's life, but I'm grateful for the chronicle of it that she's left.