Last Wednesday evening at 6:30, they officially dedicated and lit the marquee of the newly-rechristened Stephen Sondheim Theater in New York. Here's some coverage of the event, complete with a few funny remarks by Nathan Lane and some tearful ones from the honoree. I read one article that said this is only the second time in the history of Broadway that someone has been alive to see his or her name go up on a theater like this. The other one was Neil Simon.
(And since I mentioned his name: Has anyone seen Neil Simon appear in public lately? I'm thinking it's been quite a while…maybe since before the Larry Gelbart memorial last December which he did not attend. Someone there said "Doc's not well" but they made it sound like a case of the flu or something. I'd like to think he's just been locked away writing the play of his lifetime…) Anyway, here's Sondheim in what must be one of the happiest moments of his life…
Posted on Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 10:49 AM
From (probably) 1963, another rare old Johnny Carson clip, this one featuring Allan Sherman. Notice how Carson seemed unprepared for the gag that Sherman brought on, and how Allan had to nudge him into going along with it. That would never happen today with Letterman or Leno. They'd both know exactly what the guest had planned and would veto it if they weren't prepared to participate…
Posted on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 12:12 AM
Cathy Rigby is about to embark on what must be her nine-thousandth tour with the musical, Peter Pan. I think some of those were billed as "farewell" tours but who cares? She's wonderful in the part. I grew up, as many of you did, with the Mary Martin version as an occasional TV spectacular. At the risk of committing heresy, I like the Rigby version better. They chucked a lot of the campier stuff and played Hook as a villainous pirate instead of as a hairdresser with a chemical imbalance…and though Ms. Rigby is getting on in years and is a woman, it's still possible to forget that and pretend for the duration of the play that she's an adolescent male who can really fly. (I'm sorry. Mary Martin was a legend of the theater but I could never see her as anything other than someone's grandma on a wire.) Cathy Rigby is also a better singer.
I found this video, which features scenes from an earlier staging, but I haven't been able to find out much about where this tour will be touring. It apparently commences in August of 2011 at the La Mirada Performing Arts Center (which Rigby and her husband book) here in Southern California, and then it'll be in New York for the holidays…but other than that, it looks like they're searching for venues to play. If anyone comes across additional info about where they'll be, lemme know…
As we noted here some time ago, Henry Miller's Theater in New York is being renamed the Stephen Sondheim. This Mr. Miller was not the famous author. This one was a theatrical entrepreneur and actor when the place opened in 1918. It subsequently went through many ownerships and names and functions. It was a porn theater for a time. It was a disco. When a revival of Cabaret played there for a time, the hall was rechristened The Kit-Kat Club, same as the nightclub in the play. After that in 2001 when Urinetown played there, that name didn't seem appropriate so it went back to its old name…and now this Wednesday, they'll unveil the new marquee making it the Sondheim. The Pee Wee Herman Show will be its first tenant, followed by a revival of Anything Goes. Perhaps someday, something by Stephen Sondheim will play there.
Broadway author Fred Landau is the guy who was responsible for that great parody of "In Buddy's Eyes" that made it about Betty White. He's back now with another song from Follies rewritten for the occasion and this one, he sings himself…
I want to thank Tim Davis for sending me the link to one of the best videos I've ever been able to slap up here…
So…a lady named Vanessa married a man named Lin-Manuel. They get to the big wedding reception and Vanessa's father gets up and starts a little speech, the kind most fathers make when their daughters wed. Here's what happened next…
We're only a few weeks from the 50th anniversary of The Magic Land of Allakazam. One of my favorite TV shows when I was a young'un debuted on CBS on Saturday morning, October 1 of 1960. I may have only tuned in initially because each episode included one cartoon from the Huckleberry Hound show…but I soon became fascinated with what surrounded it; so much so that I wasn't bothered one bit the second season when the cartoons were eliminated. Master magician Mark Wilson would perform amazing feats and — maybe the best part — each week, he'd teach viewers a simple trick that they could do at home. Naturally, I tried every one of them out on my parents and I recall at least a couple times when I managed to actually fool my father. He always acted as if he had no idea how I'd done it but once or twice, it was different. Once or twice, I could tell he actually was baffled. Knowing something your parents don't know is a big deal when you're eight.
At that age, I was already a bit interested in magic, and watching Mark Wilson make things appear and disappear and float fired up that interest. Oddly enough, I was never much into performing in front of people…and when I did, it was for one or two people, never a large group. If I mastered a trick well enough to do it in the mirror, that was enough for me. The few times I assembled a little magic act and did things for a crowd, I didn't particularly enjoy it…but I certainly respected those who did and did it well. I became more of a historian/appreciator of magic than a practitioner and joined the Academy of Magical Arts, aka The Magic Castle. In a piece here some time ago, I wrote the following…
Mark Wilson, by the way, continues to perform magic but is mainly a teacher and consultant. His spouse — "the lovely Nani Darnell," who you'll see in our video clip — handles a lot of his business dealings. Last year, I took a card manipulation class at The Magic Castle. It was not taught by Mr. Wilson but Nani handled the sign-ups and tuition collection and such. Now, you'll have to imagine the following…
We're all in the classroom — guys about my age, all wearing jackets and ties because you have to wear a jacket and tie when you go to the Castle in the evening. Nani comes in and handles the last of the paperwork, then leaves…still looking quite lovely, almost a half-century after the filming of the video below. As soon as she's out of the room, our instructor (a very famous, important magician) admits that he started doing magic decades ago because he had a crush on her and thought that that was the way to get women who looked like that…
…and every guy in the room, myself included, nods in understanding and agreement.
When you hear magicians say that they were inspired by Dai Vernon or Blackstone or even Houdini…well, that may be true in many ways. But I'll bet Nani Darnell caused more young men in the early sixties to become magicians than any of those guys.
The Magic Land of Allakazam was the first regular network series to feature magic tricks. In the video, they say it's been the only one and I sure can't think of another. Don Alan, a fine magician I got to meet and work with before he passed away, had a syndicated show called Magic Ranch for 13 episodes in '61, obviously produced in light of Mark Wilson's success. There have been oodles of magic specials but that's about it for series.
I came to appreciate how difficult that show must have been for Mr. Wilson. Your average experienced magician has a repertoire of maybe an hour's worth of tricks. Some have a lot less. It takes time to develop and learn most of the good magic feats and it costs a lot of money for the hardware to perform the big ones. Mark Wilson had to fill a half-hour every week. That's a helluva lot of magic to conceive, build, rehearse, etc. He also had to work out ways to make the magic credible on a series that was shot on film and obviously edited. The tricks weren't edited but the show itself was and that always reminds you that you're not seeing a live performance.
Thanks to every magic book that I was able to check out from the library, I could figure out how many of Mark Wilson's tricks were done, and that caused my young mind to occasionally wrestle with ethical issues. Wilson would proclaim every week that the magic was done without the aid of any camera tricks — and apart from the opening of the show and some bits in commercials, that seemed to be true. But then in the midst of an illusion, he'd say, "Nani is inside the box," and I knew darn well Nani was no longer in that box. When he said, "I'm putting the three of hearts in my pocket," I knew he actually had it in his other hand. So I'd wonder, at least with regard to the tricks I couldn't figure out: If he'd lie about Nani being in the box and about the three of hearts going into his pocket, is he lying about there being no camera trickery? I'm now sure he wasn't but there is kind of an odd moral standard at work in some magic.
The Magic Land of Allakazam was sponsored by Kellogg's cereal and the show was loaded with Kellogg's promotion. It was on CBS from 1960 to 1962 and then on ABC for a few more years before it disappeared. Wilson sells old episodes on DVD and has a whole website about the show and its history here. He also sells some pretty decent books and videos on how to do magic. Here's a little video that they built out of the show's opening titles. The odd edits whenever Rebo the Clown looks into the Magic Wishing Hat are because they've cut out little clips of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks and Pixie and Dixie that used to be in there. I bought some DVDs of the old shows (which alas, lack the Hanna-Barbera elements) and the whole episodes still have that old — the word is unavoidable — magic…
It's been a while since I've mentioned Big Daddy here. Big Daddy was a local (L.A.) band I followed for a number of years…a group of fine musicians who had a great gimmick.They'd take contemporary rock hits — the stuff that was then on the charts — and redo those songs in the style of the fifties…you know, kind of like, "What if Michael Jackson's latest record had been recorded in 1958 by the Platters?"That kind of thing.They were very clever and funny…and I liked their versions of some songs better than the hit versions. Alas, they no longer perform or record and most of their albums and CDs are outta print…though you can buy or download this one.
I linked to a couple of videos of their work here, here, here, here, here, here and even here.Today's video is someone's home movie from back when Big Daddy worked at Disneyland.They'd start each set by playing real fifties music and then segue over to their anachronistic delights. My thanks to Brighton Roc for telling me about this one…
Here…meet my pal Colleen Doran, a very talented artist with an uncommon hunk of business acumen. Those two skills do not always go together, which is why you too often hear of creative folks who fear they won't be able to continue writing or drawing once their electricity is turned off. Or some of them do understand the "money stuff" but in any struggle between their creative impulses and common sense of livelihood, the latter loses out. (And what's really sad is when neglect of the contract or deal terms ends up wounding the work. I'm getting tearful calls now from an artist friend who's not only not being paid properly for his work, he's discovering he gave the publisher permission to destroy its integrity in a dozen different ways.)
So here's Colleen, who doesn't make such mistakes…and who is generously outspoken in advising others not to…
Here's some footage I never thought I'd see…one of those things I assumed was long since lost to the world. In August of 1963, Allan Sherman guest-hosted Johnny Carson's show for a week. I loved Allan Sherman and begged my parents to allow me to stay up late enough to watch. They lovingly said no. Not on a school night…and for reasons I can't recall, I don't think I even saw him on Friday night, when there was no school the next day. Yet here's a few key minutes of that week on YouTube…
Mr. Sherman hosted from Monday, August 5 through Friday, August 9. On Monday's show, he came out and issued a challenge to Cary Grant, who at the time was about the handsomest, classiest man in the movie business…and someone who'd never really done television. Sherman explained that the short, pudgy guy we all saw on TV and on the covers of his record albums was a character he'd created; that he really looked just like Cary Grant but that the other look just seemed more fitting for a guy who sang quasi-Jewish song parodies. The challenge was to come on the program and allow America to make a side-by-side comparison and determine which of them was the more adorable.
That was on Monday. On Tuesday night's show, Sherman came out and announced he had not heard a peep from Cary Grant. This, of course, was an admission that Cary was afraid to let the public decide. And then on Wednesday afternoon, Sherman received a telegram of concession from Grant and on Thursday, an off-the-air phone call. I believe Grant apologized to him, explaining that he was shooting a movie (probably Charade) or he'd have flown back to New York and appeared on the show to properly button the gag. But Sherman had fun with it, anyway. The video below starts with the opening of the show from Wednesday night, then cuts to a statement he made on Friday night to sum up. My thanks and amazement to Barry Mitchell for digging this up…
Here's an intriguing clip…intriguing at least for Yours Truly, a huge fan of The Tonight Show in all its incarnations.
In 1977, back when Tom Snyder followed that program with his, Rob Reiner guest-hosted for Johnny Carson. His guests were basically his buddies — Harry Shearer, Billy Crystal and Albert Brooks. Since I like all four of those folks, I wanted to see it but I had to be somewhere else that evening. Fortunately, I'd just gotten my first VCR…and this was before VHS, before Betamax. Such machines were making their way into the marketplace but I didn't have one. I had this clunky Panasonic U-Matic machine that took huge 3/4" video cassettes. Usually, you used one of those with tapes that held one hour or less. There were 90 minute cassettes but the tape in them was so thin that it often jammed. I don't think I ever had a 90 minute cassette that lasted very long. The second or third time you recorded on one, it would snarl and you'd have to toss it out.
Since The Tonight Show was then 90 minutes, I inserted one in my VCR, set the timer and went out. I got home just as Mr. Snyder's Tomorrow Show was commencing and as I watched his opening, I heard something like the following. This is a paraphrase from memory but I do distinctly recall that Snyder was obviously pissed and practically had steam coming out of his ears…
You know, when you do a show like this, you're always at the mercy of the ratings…and sometimes, when they're down, that's your fault and sometimes, you pay the price for the sins of others. For years, Johnny Carson has delivered a strong lead-in, for which all of us here are grateful. People watch Johnny 'til the end and a lot of them stay tuned for us, and it's helped make this show a success. But some nights, Johnny's off and you get a lead-in like we got tonight from this person named Rob Reiner. We all watched his show, which was taped earlier, before we sat down to do this and…well, most of you probably saw it and it was embarrassing. Mr. Reiner is wonderfully entertaining on All in the Family but he's just not cut out to host a show like that and I'm sure he knows it now because of all the flop sweat we all saw coming off our screens. He had on Albert Brooks, who usually makes me laugh, and he did this bit I don't understand about throwing his clothes in the air and…well, you saw it. Not a snicker. There was a lot of that show that wasn't very funny and that isn't a crime. It happens in television. What got me was that for some reason, Rob Reiner started taking cheap shots at me. Hey, I had nothing to do with that show but here he is on the screen, joking about how poorly it was going and telling America, "Well, at least you can go to bed now and not have to watch that idiot Tom Snyder after this." And I think, "You know, we work hard here to do our little show without much money and without much promotion. It doesn't help us to have a bad show on before us and for that bad show to be telling people to turn off their sets and go to bed. I wonder how long All in the Family would have been on if the show before it did that. Mr. Reiner, I'm not the reason you had a bad night on television. Don't take your failings out on me."
As I said, that's from memory and it's by no means verbatim, but I think I got the attitude right. Snyder looked like he wanted to run over and deck Reiner. Naturally, once I heard that, I couldn't wait to see what had happened on The Tonight Show preceding it…but I never did. The 90-minute cassette jammed during rewind and the tape was trashed. I even attempted reconstructive surgery, opening the cassette and trying to smooth things out but no luck.
There must have been something to what Snyder said. The next night, he opened his show by reading a note he'd received — a pretty humble, sincere apology from Rob Reiner. Tom accepted the mea culpa, called Reiner a true gentleman and the matter was never raised again. I did, of course, wonder about what had happened on The Tonight Show but it didn't seem like anything I would ever see. They didn't rerun shows with guest hosts.
Recently, someone put about eight minutes of that Tonight Show up on YouTube. It's not the Albert Brooks bit and it's not the end of the show, which is when (I understood) Reiner said whatever he said that ticked Snyder off. It's Harry Shearer and Billy Crystal performing a rather funny parody of…Tom Snyder. I never knew they'd done such a thing on the program. Watching it now, I don't think it alone is what upset Snyder. It's not cruel but the intro is kinda close to what Snyder complained about…so I'm wondering now if some or all of my previous assumptions were correct. Particularly in light of that sincere apology, I assumed Snyder had accurately characterized what Reiner had done.
What makes me wonder is that around 1980 or so, I got to have lunch with Tom Snyder. That sentence sounds like it was a closer relationship than it actually was. I was dining at Hamptons, a restaurant in Burbank, with a couple of TV producers and Bruce McKay, an NBC exec who had worked for Snyder. Because of Bruce, our group was invited (more like commanded) to join a nearby table where Snyder was lunching with an entourage and we all sat there for at least an hour enjoying The Tom Snyder Show as he held court. He was a loud, overpowering presence but very, very interesting and witty as he told stories, ventured opinions, etc. One topic I recall was that someone asked him about the by-now-defunct parodies of him on Saturday Night Live by Dan Aykroyd. Snyder made it clear that while he respected Aykroyd's talents and would have been flattered by the occasional spoof, he thought the sketches came out of some deep, inexplicable (he used the word, "pathological") hatred of him by the show's producers and writers.
One thing I especially recall is that he said it was frustrating to him because none of the NBC executives ever watched his show — a statement that Bruce McKay said was only a slight exaggeration. Snyder continued, "Apparently, not one of them knows how to put a video cassette into a tape machine and watch last night's Tomorrow Show. What they do watch is Saturday Night Live and they get confused and they think that's me. They think my show is like that." He told an anecdote about how an NBC vice-president had said something to him about a remark he [Snyder] had made on his show a week or two earlier. Tom hadn't recalled making the remark and later, when he mentioned it to one of his associates, they said, "Oh, that's something Dan Aykroyd said a few weeks ago when he was doing you."
Anyway, I don't know exactly what it was in that Reiner-hosted Tonight Show that upset Tom Snyder but I don't think it was this spoof of him by Shearer and Crystal. Matter of fact, I think I remember Snyder in some interview praising Harry Shearer's impression of him and the way he said it made it sound like he was saying it to indicate that he didn't much like the Aykroyd imitation. And I've gone on way too long about this so I suggest you just watch the clip…
Labor Day is almost upon us and you know what that means: Jerry.
As usual, I am baffled as to how long the telethon is. The press releases say it runs 21 and a half hours but I don't think that means they're doing a show of that length. Many of the hours are reruns of other hours and there are probably very few stations across the country that broadcast all 21.5 hours. WGN in Chicago is running it from 8 PM Sunday until 11 AM Monday morning then they play hooky from the Love Network to air a baseball game (Astros vs. Cubs) for approximately three and a half hours, then they come back and go 'til five…so that's 17 and a half hours. Some air a lot less…but some run more than there are. In Los Angeles, KCAL Channel 9 is airing the show from 6 PM Sunday evening through 5 PM Monday evening…so they're running 23 hours of a 21 and a half hour telethon.
Does anyone have any idea how many hours they're actually doing from the South Point hotel-casino in Las Vegas? You have all those musical numbers that are pre-taped elsewhere. You have all the segments on the work MDA is doing. You have your local cutaways. It probably isn't a lot.
(By the way: If you want to set your TiVo, try searching under "45th Annual Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon.")
In case you missed last year, here's nine minutes of mostly non-Jerry content. I never heard of some of these acts either but a lot of them are very good…
From 1931, a look at cartoonists working for the Chicago Tribune and its syndicate. This was back when such folks actually did draw wearing jackets and ties…
Just watch this. Race track announcer Larry Collmus calls a horse race at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. Two of the horses' names make things interesting…
From the 11th Annual Emmy Awards ceremony: Elaine May and Mike Nichols show us how these things should work. Something like this would certainly have livened up Sunday night's telecast…or at least, the half of it that wasn't about Betty White…
