Broadway's Most Wanted (27 page)

Perhaps the funniest half-hour in TV sitcom history, this episode of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
aired on December 26, 1962. The show’s hero, Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) is a bit of a local celebrity in his quiet New Rochelle
neighborhood, because he writes for
The Alan Brady Show.
This naturally brings out the “star” in everyone, and this dilemma reaches a head in the neighborhood’s annual talent show.

Mrs. Billings, chairman of the variety show, manages to rope Rob in every year, (“Ohhh, Mr. Petrie! It’s so eeeeeeeeeeeasy for you!” squeals the magnificent Eleanor Audley), so his plate is already full writing and directing the show. Then we get to the rehearsal in the Petrie home. After Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) wows ’em with her calypso number, “True, Mon, True,” we get to the show’s Cleopatra sketch. The Petrie’s neighbor Millie is Cleopatra, while another neighbor, Harry Roberts (Bob Crane), is Marc Antony. He’s so enthusiastic, he’s turned his sweater into a toga and changed “I have arrived from Rome” to “I have a-Romed from Rive.” Trouble is, Millie’s husband Jerry objects to the passionate kiss the two share, and he dares Rob to put Laura in the sketch instead.

Rob bites, Laura kisses Harry, and Rob suggests they merely shake hands instead, ha-ha. Laura guesses the problem and withdraws, leaving only the mousy kindergarten teacher to play Cleopatra. And when her glasses come off and her hair comes down? Hellooo, Nurse! It is at this time, as Antony and Cleo kiss
again,
that Harry’s good wife walks in, sees him, and walks out the door, yelling at him to come home. After an off-screen shouting match, Crane sticks his head in and sheepishly offers one of the greatest punch lines ever: “One of the kids is sick.”

Before there was a Tony for Andrea Martin (for 1992’s
My Favorite Year),
there was
SCTV
in Canada. It was on
this great sketch comedy series, with fellow cast members, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Flaherty, Rick Moranis, and Martin Short, that some of the greatest characters in TV history, including Libby Wolfson, were born.

Libby Wolfson was Martin’s “Eighties woman” creation, a clueless, self-empowerment-spouting host of her own SCTV gab-show,
You!.
What made the concept work was that Wolfson was really just a mess of insecurities (“I would kill to be anorexic for one week,” she once told a guest on her show) who needed constant on-screen validation from her best friend, Sue Bopper-Simpson (Catherine O’Hara).

Together, Wolfson and Simpson created I’
m Taking My Own Head, Screwing it on Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t. Head
was a send-up of the lateseventies/early eighties “lib” shows popularized by Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer, the most obvious target being their “find myself” show
I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it On the Road.
With the pliable Seth Dick III as the show’s all-purpose Man,
Head
played one pathetic performance and closed. Further evidence of the multi-level brilliance of
SCTV:
The SCTV Network’s prickly social critic, Bill Needle (Dave Thomas), is busted down to theater critic, and proceeds to take Wolfson’s show apart on his new TV show, “Theater Beat.”

Film star Gene Wilder made his directorial debut with
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother,
a film that, with its obvious period trappings, cheerful vulgarity, and primitive craftsmanship, seems directly
influenced by that ’70’s camp-film
auteur,
Wilder’s good friend and colleague Mel Brooks.

Basically the title says it all, as the great detective hands one off to his brother, Sigerson Holmes (Wilder), to solve. It involves stolen letters and a performance of the opera
A Masked Ball,
directed by and starring the evil Gambetti (Dom DeLuise), in league with Professor Moriarity (Leo McKern). It is at this opening-night performance that Sigerson Holmes (with an assist from his dumber brother) solves the case and saves the day and the Empire.

The “Masked Ball” in the movie bears no relation to Verdi’s comic masterpiece; rather, it sounds like
Le Nozze di Figaro
plus Monty Python divided by P.D.Q. Bach. Madeline Kahn is hilarious as a diva in danger, singing lines like “Stop that, you’re such a tickle-tease/You know I’m super-passionate.”

Christopher Guest’s documentary-style parody of community theater rates high on the showbiz “in-joke-o-meter” for its funny, often brutal takeoff on community theater types presenting a pageant in their hometown of Blaine, Missouri (the “Stool Capital of the World”).

The good people of Blaine are put through their paces by the indefatigable Corky St. Clair, a failed drama queen with gumption enough for two Marjorie Main movies. His show,
Red, White, and Blaine!,
sounds like pretty much any amateur musical you’d care to name, with one ballad, “A Penny For Your Thoughts,” that could stand outside a parody film like this. The condescending tone of much of the movie is
made palatable by the gold-standard cast that Guest assembled: Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, and Parker Posey as four of the stalwarts, with cameos by Paul Benedict, David Cross, and Paul Dooley adding to the fun.

Television’s last great sketch-comedy show was the late, lamented
Mr. Show
from HBO, and one reason for the show’s greatness was the fearlessness of their parodies. The first season gave audiences “Joke, the Musical,” a very funny community-therater-level musicalization of the joke about the traveling salesman and the three holes in the barn wall.
Jeepers Creepers Semi-Star
earns them the nod here, though.

As you could probably guess, it’s a parody of
Jesus Christ Superstar,
and an almost spot-on parody at that. It’s a scrupulously faithful homage to Norman Jewison’s film version of
Superstar,
with the “troupe” piling out of a school bus and dancing in the desert somewhere, as Mr. and Mrs. Creepers sing ersatz Rice-Lloyd Webber about their apathetic, not-quite-perfect son Jeepers.

The musical theater is an expanding, ever-changing art form, and its progress through the decades is fun to chart. These ten musicals gave us something new.

The granddaddy of them all, the first true musical play,
Show Boat
, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, was the first Broadway musical entertainment to combine the musical lushness and grandiose trappings of oldschool operetta with new, uncompromising storytelling techniques—the playlet
The Parson’s Bride
on the boat, for instance, underscoring the love and family relationships being shaped at the same time in real life.

Jerome Kern’s music and Oscar Hammerstein’s book and lyrics are legendary now, but how amazing it must have been to see, as the curtain rose, colored performers, not happy blackfaced minstrels but dock-workers bent over their hay bales, singing “Niggers all work on de Missisippi,/Niggers all work while de white
folks play.” An uncompromising look at race, miscegenation, and even gambling,
Show Boat
presented its themes and characters with astounding freshness.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the vanguard of musical storytelling, gave us
Allegro
in 1947, and in doing so, gave us the first true “concept musical”—a show about
how
it was about, rather than
what
it was about. A bare stage, with props and scenery rolled on and off as needed, with even a Greek chorus to tell the tale.

But what tale is being told? Is it just the tale of small-town doctor Joe, who moves away from the tiny hamlet that reared him, to the big city where he flourishes financially but dries up spiritually? Not exactly. Rodgers, Hammerstein, and director/choreographer Agnes de Mille played not only with music, lyrics, and dance, but also with time and space. For the first time, characters were seen inhabiting space they couldn’t have possibly have existed in, either as real characters or dream figures. The hero’s long-dead mother appears on stage to guide him through the play’s finale, and a Greek chorus appears in the hospital delivery room to announce his birth.
Allegro
is perhaps not up to par with other R & H masterpieces, but it’s a most valuable show in the evolution of the form.

Following the death of his longtime collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers chose to write his own lyrics for his next show,
No Strings
, in 1962. No strings, indeed: The pit band had no stringed instruments and often no pit. Director Joe Layton’s concept involved
many of the musicians wandering into the action, which was deliberately stylized and artificially staged, often on a bare stage with lights clearly visible and aimed by hand for effect, with ensemble members forming
tableaux
to comment on foreground action.

The plot, concerning the relationship between a black fashion model and a white American writer bumming around Paris, also echoes the title: Theirs is a romance with no strings attached or so each would like to think. This interracial love relationship was considerably risky for 1962 but skillfully put forth with little fanfare. It helps if she’s a world-class fashion model played by Diahann Carroll.

“New York City—NOW.” Those words, place and time, set the tone perfectly for
Company
, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s landmark musical meditation on marriage, friendship, and commitment. Furth’s ideas for several one-act plays were assembled by director Harold Prince into a plotless musical, with a score by Sondheim, that moved, looked, and sounded like no musical ever had. Furth’s script places the action in scrambled time and place, with the whole play really taking place in a split second, in a kind of theatrical limbo.

Choreographer Michael Bennett made the company of fourteen actors move by using their personal strengths (like watching the New Rochelle PTA, as some have observed) to real dramatic effect. Prince put them through their paces on Boris Aronson’s remarkable abstract, steel-and-glass set, complete with working elevators, often isolating the players in stage spaces as if each couple were alone together in the big
city. Sondheim’s score was rightly hailed as a blistering examination of nerves and neuroses, pulsating to the busy-signal, traffic-jam rhythms of the city, with everyone proclaiming their fidelity to their friend Robert, their “Bobby Baby, Bobby Bubi,” as if their very survival depended on him.

John O’ Hara’s
New Yorker
series of letters from his “pal Joey” served as the inspiration for Rodgers and Hart’s classic 1940 musical, the first musical with a rat for a hero. In fact, just about everyone in this spiked gimlet of a show is pretty rotten. Up and down the social scale, the lives examined are all unfulfilled, and the unblinking, straightforward way these lives are examined was bracingly new to the musical theater.

Our pal Joey is a charismatic louse with a little bit of song-and-dance talent; his goal in life is to own his own nightclub (“Chez Joey”—that’s
classy)
in Chicago. On his way up, he meets a sweet young kid of whom he takes advantage, and a rich older broad who takes advantage of him (who both agree in song that he’s no damn good). Never had characters sounded and acted quite as they do in
Pal Joey
, neither sentimental nor completely evil either. Chicago’s seedy underbelly was deftly examined by Rodgers and Hart (and by no-nonsense director George Abbott), and critics, even if they found the show distasteful, got the message: Musical theater was growing up.

The prodigiously gifted composer Kurt Weill seemed to make musical theater history as he went along, from his work with Bertolt Brecht in their native Germany
culminating in class-conscious masterpieces like
The Threepenny Opera
, to his work in his adopted United States, where he created political
zeitopers
like
Knickerbocker Holiday
and
Johnny Johnson. Love Life
, his 1948 collaboration with the great Alan Jay Lerner, was another step forward in the life of the American musical.

Love Life
told the story of the American family, examining love, marriage, children, economics, and the social structure. The Coopers, a nuclear family, are seen through 150-plus years of Americana, yet they don’t age. Interspersed with scenes from each time period are intercalary “vaudeville” numbers which provide commentary on the book scenes and give them depth, such as when the harried wife and mother is sawed in two by a magician, or in Michael Kidd’s the-title-says-it-all ballet, “Punch and Judy Get a Divorce.”

The legendary songwriting team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle reached their peak in 1921 with
Shuffle Along
, often credited as the first black musical. It was truly the first musical written, directed, and performed by blacks, but its significance reaches farther than that.
Shuffle Along
can honestly share the credit for launching an entire cultural movement.

Blake and Sissle met Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles at a benefit for the NAACP in 1920. The four decided to create their own musical comedy, and the result was
Shuffle Along
, which broke many barriers. By showing the performers, and the characters they played, as real human beings (real in a musical-comedy sense, anyway), instead of servile clowns or objects of cartoonish lust, and by making a hit show while
doing so,
Shuffle Along
was a touchstone for the advancement of African American art and culture. The Harlem Renaissance, that glorious era of creativity, began at the same time that
Shuffle Along
toured America. Producer Florenz Ziegfeld also hired many of the Negro performers to teach dance steps to his chorus girls, to lend them an air of authenticity.