I thought Sean Hayes did a fine job hosting the Tony Awards despite a surplus of tech screw-ups and missed cues. Is it obligatory that every year, the opening musical number has to start with someone's microphone off?
But there were enough nice moments that I wasn't bored...and hey, who would have thought the steamiest heterosexual moment on television this year would be on the Tony broadcast and would involve Kristen Chenoweth and a gay guy? And Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth managed to achieve that rare feat: Being funny as presenters. (For those of you who thought Lane's quip about Passover sounded familiar, you're right. It's a famous line from the Academy Awards uttered there by Mr. Robert Hope.)
As usual, a lot of awards went to people most of us never heard of before for work in shows most of us will never see. But I suspect Memphis won big, not just in the awards department but in the real competition, which is to stage a scene from your show that will make people want to buy tickets. By contrast though, the excerpt from La Cage aux Folles had the opposite effect, at least on me.
I haven't been to New York in a while and have been hoping to get back there before the year is out, maybe before the summer is over. Wish I'd been there in the preceding months so I could have seen some shows and had some rooting interest.
I guess it's a good thing that Jimmy Dean decided to get into the meat-packing business in the late sixties. He apparently decided his career as a TV host and country-western singer wouldn't sustain and he wanted something else to fall back on. Still, it's sad in a way that so many people probably know him only as a name on packages of pure pork sausage. He was a fine entertainer — warm, funny and either a genuinely nice guy or a damn good actor to make everyone think so. I used to tune in his 1963-1966 TV series mainly to see Rowlf the Muppet (that's him in the photo above with Jimmy) but I also enjoyed the host's easy-going smile and manner.
There was a brief period around '67 or '68 when he was "next in line" to take over The Tonight Show if Johnny Carson quit...and actually, Carson did quit during this period over a contract dispute. But before it was resolved, we had a couple of weeks of Jimmy Dean guest-hosting and I recall him doing a decent job in a tough situation. Sorry to hear he's not around anymore but boy, he had a great career.
Here's an article about a Bob Hope exhibit going up at the Library of Congress in Washington. There's also a little discussion in there about Mr. Hope's personal politics.
If anyone's interested in researching that topic, they oughta dig up a couple of interviews he did in the late sixties (I believe) with the late Lou Gordon, who ran a very smart political interview show out of Detroit. He quizzed and debated Hope about things like the Vietnam War and then-current topics, and it was quite interesting. I loved what Bob did in front of an audience to amuse but his knowledge of politics at that time sounded to me like he was just reading it all off cue cards held by Spiro Agnew.
One of Hope's writers told me that Bob, he thought, worked backwards from the belief that regardless of who was in the White House or how the country was going, he oughta be the Comedian to the President. It was a matter of importance, not worldview. So his stance was whatever would get him into that position and keep him there. The writer said he thought the only real conviction Hope had was that rich people shouldn't pay more taxes than their servants.
Anyway, read the article. And take a look at that great photo atop the Times piece and see how many stars in it you can identify. Laurel and Hardy are in there, though not together.
While in Vegas last week, I spent some time with my buddy Michael (we call him Mickey) Paraskevas, a talented illustrator (mainly of books 4 kids) and producer. Some of the things Mickey produces have real budgets and appear on real TV networks...and some of them are The Cheap Show, which he does for around eleven dollars an episode for public access TV and podcasts.
Last week was Mickey's first visit to Las Vegas and he walked around with that "Springtime for Hitler" look at times but ultimately liked the city enough that he's eager to return. He kept saying to me, "I see why you like this place." It also didn't hurt that something happened to him which seems to happen often to Vegas first-timers: He won. Granted, it was only about a hundred bucks on a slot machine but that's enough to (a) produce nine-and-a-half more episodes of The Cheap Show and (b) make him think it's always that easy. One of the things on which Las Vegas thrives is returnees trying to recreate the dumb luck they had on their first visit.
So here, if you've got the three minutes, is an appropriate episode of The Cheap Show from a while back. In it, Duncan Biscotti (played by Mickey) and Pico Smiley head for Sin City with Duncan at the wheel and Baby in the back seat. The role of Baby was played by Mickey's peachy mother, Betty Paraskevas, who left us a few weeks back. When Mickey and I were at the Licensing Show in Vegas, every single person we encountered had to tell him how much they missed Betty. Including me.
June 12, 2010
