My father loved to Sing Along With Mitch. So did much of America. It was a very corny TV show — mostly a lot of old guys in sweaters singing songs that we all knew. But it was a lot healthier than Karaoke because unless you lived in an apartment and had real thin walls, nobody else had to listen to your rotten voice.
As a kid, I thought Mitch Miller had the easiest gig in the world. He just waved his hands and everyone else sang. You never heard him warble so much as a note. I wondered: How do you get a job like that? But then I read articles that revealed that he was a lot more qualified than he seemed to be. He was a veteran musician and record producer who'd been responsible for hundreds of albums, many of them big hits. He was into popular music when it was popular for everyone, not just the buyers between the ages of 13 and 30. And his show, though sappy at times, was easy to watch, easy to listen to.
Obits like this one will tell you a lot about what else Mitch Miller did...and they don't even get into his adventures as a producer and backer of theatrical ventures and so many other enterprises. I just liked the guy...even when I didn't know just what it was he did.
You may have heard about the tax plan being proposed by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Here's an analysis of it but I can save you some time: The rich would pay a lot less taxes, the poor and middle class would pay more, Social Security would be crippled, so would Medicare and any form of government-involved health care...and the National Debt would go up, not down.
And now let's all watch as the Republican leadership tries to convince lower and middle class Americans that this would all be in their best interests.
As I mentioned back here, a musical comedy called It's a Bird, It's a Plane It's Superman debuted on Broadway in 1966 and ran for a disappointing 129 performances. Still, the show has had a pretty long afterlife for something that closed so quickly on the Great White Way. The fame of the title character seems to have a lot to do with that...and the fact that it's ideally suited for college and community theater groups. The cast is mostly young. It doesn't require skilled choreography. The sets and costumes can be done on the cheap, especially by making it all very comic-bookish. The biggest challenge in staging comes if you actually try to fly your star around the stage, and there are ingenious ways to avoid that.
Recently, the Dallas Theater Center staged a new, highly-publicized "revisal" with an amended book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. I didn't see it but the reviews were generally good and suggest a possible new life for the show. Here's another backstage video from the production, which just closed...
And while we're at it, here's an interview with the show's composer, Charles Strouse...
August 1, 2010
