Thursday, February 10, 2005

Quick Afterthought

The photo I just posted of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick was taken, I think, at the taping of the post-9/11 commercial for the Broadway community. Only a few days after the disaster, someone managed — in less time than seems humanly possible — to put together an ad spot that was shot in Times Square, featuring everyone who was then currently in a Broadway show, all singing "New York, New York." Does anyone have or know where I can find a tape or DVD or downloadable video of this spot? I thought it was just extraordinary. Trio used to run a little three minute (or so) version of it between shows, and it included the pre-record of the voice track, and showed all the people turning out on the morning of the taping, and I thought it was wonderfully inspirational. I don't know what it did for the New York theater industry — how fast it helped business come back — but it sure made me feel good to see all those people pulling together, accomplishing something that must have been a nightmare of logistics.

I had it on the end of a show that I kept for months on my TiVo, and I kept showing it to visitors and saying, "Gee, I've got to dub that off before I forget and delete the recording that it's a part of." And then...guess what. Anyway, if anyone has it, I'd love to have the whole spot as they ran it on Trio but I'll settle for just the final, 30 second finished product. (Actually, like so many of us, I'll settle for whatever I can get...)

• Posted at 8:56 PM · LINK

More Green Sandwiches and Brown Sandwiches

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have confirmed plans to star in a Broadway revival of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. It will commence in October and probably play to packed houses for however long the two of them feel like doing it.

Before you ask: Lane is playing Oscar and Broderick is playing Felix, and I have a hunch (based on absolutely nothing) that at some point, they'll try switching off for a week or so. Back when Walter Matthau was Oscar and Art Carney was Felix, they never did...though it became an Urban Legend of the theater, with people swearing they saw a performance where that happened. The rumor was apparently urged on by Matthau, who liked to put people on, telling them it had happened.

None of the press releases mention it but this will not be Mr. Lane's first time as Oscar Madison, the slovenly sports writer. A few years ago, he did it for a staged reading that is available on audio cassette. Here's the link to it but I'm not necessarily recommending you do. I did, because I love the play even if I've experienced it once too often, and this version featured a batch of my favorite actors. Nathan Lane alone was reason enough for me, but you also had David Paymer as Felix, Dan Castellaneta as Murray the Cop, Linda Purl and Yeardley Smith as the coo-coo Pigeon Sisters, and others. Great play, great cast...didn't work for me. Part of it was the fact that it was audio-only. Part of it was that I've just plain seen the play too often. And part of it was that the material, as recorded, had an odd disconnect of audience laughter and things that deserved to be laughed at. It was like a real good show having an "off" night...though of course, nothing those people do could be without interest.

I don't know how the new Lane/Broderick version will be but I do know it won't matter. That thing will sell out in a jif. And then, a year or two later, they'll probably come back — with one of them in drag — and do Barefoot in the Park.

• Posted at 8:26 PM · LINK

Name That Name

Buzz Dixon directed me to this neat site that's all about names. They have a Java program over there — it should work on most but not all computers — that displays charts of the popularity of the 1000 most common first names. You can enter "George" and watch how it's declined in popularity or enter "Jason" and watch a big spike in the seventies and so on. I didn't particularly notice trends linked to the fame or infamy of specific prominent celebs, but I suppose there's some of that in there.

• Posted at 7:57 PM · LINK

Another Weblog Welcome

Actually, it's not a new weblog at all. Three items ago, I thanked Frank San Filippo for pointing the way to an interesting site. What I should have done was also point you to Frank's blog. He just posted this comment on the percolating scandal about the phony reporter who seems to have been planted in the White House press corps to lob softball questions at Bush and his press secretary. I am not as sure as Frank that the Democrats haven't done things that were equally underhanded...and feel that if they haven't, they will. Still, I think this "whatever it takes" mentality is very bad for the country. It distresses me when either party is quick to condemn wrongdoing by their opponents but quicker to excuse or overlook an absence of ethics on their team.

• Posted at 11:20 AM · LINK

Weblog Welcome

The fine cartoonist, Don Simpson, is now blogging, which is both good news and bad. The good news is that he has some interesting perceptions on his vocation. The bad news is that when he's putting them up on the web, he isn't drawing.

• Posted at 8:47 AM · LINK

Throat Ramblings

Here's a website that offers a bit of circumstantial evidence that William Rehnquist — the gent who's now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — was Deep Throat. It's an intriguing possibility that would add to the pile of contradictions about Rehnquist's personal ethics and views, but I'm far from convinced. On the other hand, of all the guesses that involve people who are known for anything other than being Deep Throat suspects, it's the least far-fetched. [Thanks to Frank San Filippo for the pointer.]

• Posted at 8:12 AM · LINK

Proof Positive

In my book, Wertham Was Right — which you can order here, he tried to mention unobtrusively — I wrote an essay about Dr. Fredric Wertham. Back in the fifties, he was the main purveyor of the theory that the comic books then being published spawned juvenile delinquency and should be...well, it's not clear what action he wanted to see happen. He said kids should not be allowed to read comic books and that the publishers should clean up their contents, but he also said that he was adamantly against censorship. Apparently, he was in favor of comic books just so long as their intended audience didn't read them. Eventually, we had the Comics Code, which tidily laundered the content of comics and got rid of most of what Wertham didn't like and, of course, kids everywhere stopped misbehaving and having social adjustment problems.

Wertham was widely mocked for supposedly claiming that Batman and Robin were gay but that's not exactly what he said. He said their lifestyle was "...like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." Which, of course, it is — though Doc Wertham was among the very few readers who thought of it that way. But you know how these things go: Once the rumors start, they gain momentum. There are times in the comics when one can almost sense that the writer is having a little fun with that insinuation. In Wertham Was Right, which was called that as an attention-getting joke but also because I thought he occasionally was, I wrote the following...

In one issue of Justice League of America in the sixties, the heroes discover they have contracted a cosmic plague that will doom everyone they've recently touched. Green Lantern shudders to think that he has infected his eternal fiancée, Carol Ferris. The Flash realizes he has doomed his beloved, Iris West. Even the Atom thinks about the fate that will befall the woman in his life, Jean Loring...

Batman, meanwhile, thinks: "Robin...what have I done to you?"

Since my book came out, I have sometimes been accosted by someone who doubts this and thinks it's a scene that exists not in my comics but in my imagination. So the other day, when someone sent me a JPEG of the panel in question, I figured I oughta post it here. This is from Justice League of America #44, published in 1966...

There it is — written by Gardner Fox, drawn by Mike Sekowsky, with inks by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia. I have to believe Fox was chuckling when he wrote it and, knowing Mike, he probably had to be restrained from drawing Batman playing Judy Garland records with a limp wrist.

• Posted at 8:04 AM · LINK

February 11, 2005 • Current • February 9, 2005