Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Flaunt It, Baby...

Want to see the trailer for the forthcoming movie version of The Producers, which is based on the Broadway musical of The Producers, which was based on the original movie version of The Producers? Well, you know what I mean. You can view the trailer online at this site.

The industry buzz seems to be that it's a very faithful replica of the stage version...perhaps too faithful. An agent I know remarked, "Now that it's a movie again, it'll really be compared to the Zero Mostel-Gene Wilder version. That may not be a good thing."

• Posted at 7:28 PM · LINK

Tumblers, Grumblers, Bumblers, Fumblers...

Here, through the courtesy of a reader of this site, is another photo from the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers. The gent at far left is Carl Ballantine, better known to the world as "The Amazing Ballantine" and performer of what is easily the funniest magic act ever to grace a stage. Carl played Marcus Lycus the Procurer in this production and he's still around, still being very humorous. I used him to voice a recurring character on the Garfield and Friends show and --

Hey, you're not running anywhere. I might as well tell the story. When we were doing the show, I had this idea about introducing a con-artist character who'd pop up from time to time as a foil for Jon and Garfield, and I cast Jesse White to do the voice. You all remember Jesse White. That would have been brilliant casting if I'd done it a few years earlier but sadly, the day he came in to record the character's first appearance was not long before Jesse passed away. He was in poor health and he really didn't sound much like Jesse White. We went ahead with the episode but I decided on the spot that the character was not my recurring con-man.

During a break, I wandered out to the lobby and I was thinking who would be a good person to play a sharp, Bilko-type operator. Sitting there, reading a magazine and waiting to record a radio spot for someone in the next studio, was Carl Ballantine. I said aloud to no one, "Perfect," went over and introduced myself...and a few weeks later, Carl recorded the first of several Garfield cartoons as Al Swindler, master charlatan. I still see Carl from time to time. I take him to lunch or run into him at the Magic Castle and he's always hilarious. Lovely man.

Okay, back to the photo: To the right of Carl is Larry Blyden, who played Hysterium (the Jack Gilford role) in the show. Blyden was a long-time Broadway star, TV actor and even a game show host. When this production of Forum went to Broadway, he was the main instigator and organizer. He prodded the producers and dug up backers and made it all happen. For it, he also won a Tony Award. In fact, on the Tony Award broadcast that year, Silvers was more excited about Blyden's Tony than about his own and he started raving on about it and Larry and he plumb forgot he was on live television and went way over in his acceptance speech. This is why the "thank yous" from winners are now rigidly timed...because of the night they couldn't shut Phil Silvers up.

Next over, we see Lew Parker kneeling. Parker was an old-time radio comedian who became an old-time Vegas comedian who became the father of Marlo Thomas on That Girl. I think the New York production of this Forum was the last thing he ever did, as he was in failing health. He missed opening night on Broadway...something most actors wouldn't do if it meant performing in an oxygen tent. Soon after, he was replaced by actor Mort Marshall, who animation buffs may know as a voice actor on New York-based TV cartoons of the sixties. (He played the zookeeper on Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, for instance.) Parker died a few months after leaving the cast.

Lastly, of course, we have Phil Silvers. I guess I don't have to work very hard to convince most people that he was terrific in the role. He was terrific in just about everything he did. As I mentioned, I was privileged to dine with him once at Nate 'n' Al's delicatessen in Beverly Hills. I wrote up some moments from that brunch/lunch and posted them here and here. One of these days, when I find the rest of the transcript, I'll post some more of our conversation.

• Posted at 5:52 PM · LINK

Something for Everyone...

Pat O'Neill wrote to say, "It's probably worth mentioning that [Phil] Silvers did finally wind up in A Funny Thing..., if only in the film version." He wound up in the stage version, too. In 1971, a few years after the dreadful movie adaptation in which he played Marcus Lycus, Silvers starred as Pseudolus in a Los Angeles revival that I often cite as the best evening I ever spent in a theater.

It was a great production. Co-author Burt Shevelove directed, and Stephen Sondheim wrote two new songs — one for Nancy Walker who played Domina. Also in the cast were Lew Parker (who you probably remember as Marlo Thomas's father on That Girl), Larry Blyden, Carl Ballantine and others of that expertise. One of the courtesans was Ann Jillian. Another was a magnificent Broadway dancer named Charlene Ryan who is now married to some guy who draws for Mad Magazine. (In the above photo, Charlene's the one on the far left. Ann Jillian is not in the photo, which is from the later New York engagement.)

I was not present for opening night when many things went wrong. Forum begins with Pseudolus announcing, "Playgoers, I bid you welcome! The theater is a temple and we are here to worship the gods of comedy and tragedy." Silvers entered, the audience burst into wild, unexpected applause and his mind went blank. He stood there fumbling for the line until finally, months later, he somehow came out with, "The theater is a church?"

In the rear of the Ahmanson Theater that night were co-authors Shevelove and Gelbart. One of them turned to the other and said, "If a nice Jewish boy like Phil Silvers can't remember the word 'temple,' we're in for a long evening." Later, there were other blunders: Missed entrances, absent props, etc. The reviews suggested it might be a decent show if you saw it in a high school auditorium.

I saw it the second night...from second row center. My family was far from wealthy but we had some friends who were there, and they often gave us tickets they'd paid for and didn't want to use. (I saw It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — also with Phil Silvers and also wildly influential on me — from other seats they chose not to occupy.) Everything went right and in later years, when non-theatergoing friends of mine wondered what the appeal was, I wished I could have dragged them down to that show and especially those seats. I never laughed so much in my life. The women were gorgeous, the songs were great, the women were gorgeous. Yes, I know I mentioned that twice.

The show was so good that they couldn't let it close after that limited engagement. Larry Blyden, who played Hysterium, found investors and the production headed for Broadway, stopping off for a month or so in Chicago on the way.

Opening in New York gave Silvers several moments of personal triumph and tragedy. It was his "comeback" triumph after several years of emotional problems and severe depressions that had curtailed his performing and even sent him for a time to a sanitarium. In fact, one of the main reasons the show got done in L.A. was that several of his friends and agents thought work would be the perfect therapy for their pal. On Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Silvers got rave reviews and a Tony award he later called one of the high points of his career. It looked like the show was settled in for a long, profitable run...and then Phil had a stroke, not big enough to kill him but enough to take him out of Forum.

The producers scrambled to find a replacement star but the one they got — Tom Poston — didn't draw ticket buyers the way Silvers had, and the production closed after 156 performances total. When I had lunch with Silvers a few years later, he kept making the point over and over again that the stroke, which caused the investors to lose all they'd put into the show, was not his fault. I doubt anyone had ever said it was but he was very defensive on the point. The production had been very important to him, and I think the reason he agreed at all to meet with me was because I'd seen it and loved it and he wanted to hear someone tell him that.

When I get a chance one of these days, I'll write a piece here about why I think the movie version of Forum was such a disaster. (One in a long list: When you start by throwing out most of a Sondheim score, someone doesn't know what they're doing.) But since Pat gave me a reason to mention the Phil Silvers stage revival, I thought I'd grab the opportunity. I doubt more than one or two of you saw it, and of course you can never see it. But I hope you've seen or will someday see a show that stays with you as long as that production has stayed with me.

• Posted at 12:48 PM · LINK

Following Up...

A little more than a month ago (in this posting), we said that there would soon be an announcement that Get Smart will get the full, entire-series-on-DVD treatment. Sure enough, it has now been confirmed that they're coming out in 2006.

In the Sad News Department: We mentioned back here that Cartoonist PROfiles, the magazine that has covered the world of comic strips for more than 35 years, might be nearing its end. This was due to the failing health of its editor, Jud Hurd, and now Editor and Publisher is reporting that Mr. Hurd died September 14. The cause of death is given as pneumonia, his age is given as 92, and the article says there will be no more issues of his magazine. I never met Hurd but as a subscriber since his first issue, I feel a great sense of loss.

• Posted at 9:05 AM · LINK

It's Legitimate

In 1959, CBS cancelled The Phil Silvers Show, which was the hit sitcom otherwise known as both You'll Never Get Rich and Sgt. Bilko. The series was still enormously popular but it was also very expensive to produce. (Some episodes had a speaking cast of twenty.) A genius at the network decided it was cost-efficient to stop the series and sell the reruns to NBC, which stripped them in a late afternoon weekday timeslot and cleaned up.

This put Mr. Silvers at liberty and he decided to return to Broadway, which was big news as he was then a very big star. Producers threw scripts and proposals his way, and he briefly toyed with starring in a new musical that had just been written by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart and some newcomer named Stephen Sondheim called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Then he changed his mind and opted for a new musical by Garson Kanin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne entitled Do Re Mi. Directed by Kanin, it opened at the St. James Theater the day after Christmas of 1960. Also in the cast were Nancy Walker, Nancy Dussault, David Burns and Al Lewis, who is better known to us now as "Grandpa" Al Lewis of The Munsters. The show went on hiatus for a month the following summer but still ran 400 performances. One song from it — "Make Someone Happy" — became a hit apart from the show, especially the record of it recorded by Perry Como.

I never saw that production but based on what I saw Monday night — I'll tell you what it was in a moment — I think I can draw a few conclusions, the main one being that Do Re Mi isn't a very good show. The plot is pretty hokey. A small-time operator named Hubie Cram (the Silvers role) comes up with a get-rich scheme. Once upon a time, he worked as a kind of messenger boy for "The Mob," back when it was trafficking in slot machines. The idea is that with jukeboxes catching on big, he'll get his old employers out of retirement, they'll go legitimate and sell jukes the way they once sold slots, only without lawbreaking. Despite the urging of his wife (Nancy Walker), Hubie does this and things go right for a time and then go wrong — first, when his star recording artist falls in love with the head of a rival jukebox company and then when his associates revert to their old strongarm tactics. It all wraps up with the senate conducting hearings and Hubie doing a big, musical mea culpa.

That this thing lasted 400 performances is obviously because Phil Silvers was willing to do 400 performances. He and Nancy Walker could probably have stood on a stage, belched for two hours and still sold tickets. It's rather telling that the show had very little life after that. It was not, like most other hit Broadway musicals, produced hundreds of times in theaters all over the country. Everyone knew there wasn't much point in doing it if you didn't have someone the caliber of Mr. Silvers to carry the proceedings, and people that good are not easy to find. The only known attempt to revive the show came in 1999 when the City Center "Encores" series did five performances with an all-star cast headed by Nathan Lane.

Yet another revival was what I saw last evening and it was so well done that it pointed up the weaknesses in the material. The Musical Theater Guild of Southern California revives old musicals for two or three performances and does a very fine job of them, even without a budget or much rehearsal. Hubie was played by Michael Kostroff, who recently concluded a national tour of The Producers, and boy, was he good. So was Eydie Alyson as his wife. So was the entire company, which included a gentleman named S. Marc Jordan who was in the original production with Mr. Silvers and who played the same roles last night. At the end, I turned to my companion and said, "Is it my imagination or was this a very good production of a pretty weak play?" If you have a theater group and you're looking for a musical to stage that everyone isn't sick of, don't bother with Do Re Mi; not unless you can corral someone as good as Phil Silvers or Nathan Lane or Michael Kostroff to play the lead. Even then, audience members will sit there, laugh and applaud and say, "Boy, I wish I could see this cast in a better show."

• Posted at 1:28 AM · LINK