I just stumbled across this and it's kinda funny. You all know Billy Mays, the guy who sells Oxi-Clean and Kaboom and...well, he can sell just about anything. Obama oughta hire the guy to sell his health plan.
Anyway, someone went out and registered www.billymays.net and another domain bearing that name and this person is hoping to get Mr. Mays to buy them from him at a profit. Click on the link and see how he's trying to entice his buyer.
There are many holes in which our current financial crisis grew and festered but none deeper than the outfit known as Goldman, Sachs. Its head honcho, Lloyd Blankfein, recently penned a kind of blame-shifting apology and Matt Taibbi is having none of it. It's one of those scandals that America would be a lot angrier about if everyone understood just what was done to us and how much loot the perpetrators have gotten away with.
I won't be there to see it but the Goodman Theater in Chicago will be mounting a new production of Animal Crackers in September. Apart from Cocoanuts, I can't think of another play where you have to get folks to impersonate exactly the actors who originated the roles on Broadway. When you do My Fair Lady, you might cast a Higgins who reminds people of Rex Harrison...but you don't get a guy and make him up to look like Rex Harrison and have him slavishly imitate Rex Harrison's voice. When you do Animal Crackers or Cocoanuts, however, you need to find folks who can replicate Groucho, Harpo and Chico...and if you want to be really faithful, Zeppo as well. (That's the hard part. There aren't a lot of good Zeppo Marx impersonators working these days...)
I dunno if the Goodman Theater company is doing what's customary in this kind of revival, which is to stick to the original text — probably a lot closer than the Marx Brothers ever did — but to interpolate other, more popular songs by the same composer(s). Other Irving Berlin tunes have a way of sneaking into revivals of Cocoanuts while hit tunes that Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote for other shows often turn up in new productions of Animal Crackers.
I'm not familiar with any of the actors who've been cast but you can see their names, photos and brief bios over in this section of the Goodman Theater website. The most controversial choice presumably will be that Harpo's role will be played by a woman. In most productions of Animal Crackers, Harpo did a lot of chasing ladies around stage. It should make for an interesting subtext.
Thanks to "Shiai" for reminding me that I wanted to write about this. If anyone reading this attends, I expect a full report.
Okay, here's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in German. Notice that Dick Van Dyke, dubbed into German for this, still sounds more British than he did in Mary Poppins.
June 23, 2009
