shoop and nothing at stake, part 1

For a birthday present, Mrs. Shoop and I took a friend to see the long-running musical Wicked. We had fun, but I was bothered by a few elements of the show, and it took me a while to figure out what was missing for me. I think I've got it now. It has to do with "the stakes."

As an occasional actor, I would hear "raise the stakes" from directors more than occasionally. I would always want to respond with a witty retort along the lines of "oh, yeah?", but I never got around to it. And much to my chagrin, I find myself using the phrase when I direct--we do, metaphorically, become our parents. The phrase means to invest more emotionally in the situation--there needs to be more at stake, otherwise you've got a conversation or a discussion when you need something huge and life-changing.

With musicals, the general wisdom is that characters sing when the stakes are so high, there's no other way to express their feelings. And that, I think, is primarily what's wrong with Wicked. There are plenty of high stakes in the story itself--it's the Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the "Wicked" Witch of the West, and she's in the center of an emotionally loaded story, except when anybody sings, and the stakes disappear. Which, for a musical, should be absolutely deadly.

The songs are by Stephen Schwartz, and the thing about Schwartz is that he's still the same goofy guy who found himself the composer of Godspell and Pippin all at once back in the 70s. The songs were never that great, but they were pleasant and occasionally clever, and they had some youthful enthusiasm. And he's still writing pleasant and occasionally clever songs, but the enthusiasm's gone, and it hasn't been replaced with anything deeper. Moreover, it would appear that the only reason the songs are in the show is that it's a musical--originally with two big musical stars whose names were above the title--and the songs pretty much have to be there. But do they really?

Listen to the Broadway cast recording closely if you haven't seen the show. There's the "I want" song, "The Wizard and I," where the wicked witch voices her deepest aspirations--she wants to work closely with the Wizard to make Oz better. (Interesting note: it's Elphaba, the wicked witch, who gets the "I want" song, so that should make it her story. The fact that Wicked is only partially her story is another one of the problems.) Fine, that song needs to be there. But a song where Glinda and Elphaba sing about "loathing" each other? Why, exactly? How about they say, "I hate you," and "I hate you more," and then move on to the next scene? Or "Popular"? Okay, yes, it gave Kristin Chenoweth a big comic number, and you have to give Krtistin Chenoweth the big comic number, and it also gave spunky future showgirls all over the world a song to learn, lip-synch to, and channel their inner Chenoweths. But no way does the situation--Glinda gives Elphaba tips to be popular--warrant a song. There are power ballads for Elphaba, at least two or three, and they all sound the same and could be taken care of with a few lines of dialogue. There's never enough at stake to get the characters singing. Occasionally the songs, and the performers, provide some entertainment, but it's entertainment that has nothing to do with story or character.

Wicked probably would have made a cool straight play. But it's a musical, and my goodness, what a mammoth cultural juggernaut it is. One more thing--the merchandising that the legions of tween girls have to score either before the show or during the intermission. You have two main choices--green attire that encourages "Defying Gravity," recalling Elphaba's big end-of-Act-One number celebrating empowerment and possibility (and yes, a 2-minute monologue would have been more effective here, too), or pink bottoms with the word "Popular" emblazoned on the ass. It's too square of me, I suppose, to worry about "mixed messages," but I do anyway. Maybe girls can defy gravity, but they still have to know about pop-U-lar.

Next time: nothing at stake, part 2--Darwin in Malibu.

shoop and william's doll

I suppose I missed my big opportunity to be topical and say something about Obama's Peace Prize. But really, all I have to say about it that I see the prize as a kind of Saving Private Ryan medal, with the Nobel Committee in the role of Tom Hanks, telling Obama to "earn it." Which is fine with me. Of course, if it's a slap in the face to our former president, I guess that's okay, too--he can handle it. But really, I'd much rather write about my friend William and his doll.

For those of you who didn't pick up on the reference right away, "William Wants a Doll" is a segment from "Free to Be You and Me," a children's special that made a huge impression on me and at least some of my peers. It first aired in 1974 or thereabouts, and it had cartoons, puppets, songs, a slew of guest stars, a distinctly 1970s "let's break down the traditional gender roles" sensibility, and a lot of Marlo Thomas. If you revisit the program after many years, or if you see it for the first time, you'll probably think, "Damn, that's a lot of Marlo Thomas. A LOT. I mean, wow, I kinda liked 'That Girl' and all, but damn, that's a lot of Marlo Thomas." At least, that's what I thought. Come to think of it, I think that's what I was thinking when I first saw it. Now, I know I should give her due credit--Thomas was the producer, and she's the one who made it happen. So if she wants to narrate all the cartoons, provide 90% of the voices, and appear in all the live-action and musical segments, she certainly has every right to do so. It just helps if you like Marlo Thomas. A lot.

The reason "William Wants a Doll" stands out for me is that I use that segment, courtesy of YouTube, on my students when we start reading essays on gender roles. I showed it a week or so ago in class, and one of the "real" professors pounded on my closed classroom door asking me to turn it down. Well, I can't blame Real Professor entirely--the chorus does get a bit insistent: "A doll, a doll, William wants a doll..." with Alan Alda and the kid backup singers milking the childish maliciousness for all its worth. (Marlo Thomas was the voice of William. Like I said, she's all over this thing.) At any rate, the song and cartoon tell the story of William, who wants a baby doll--not in the Karl Malden-Caroll Baker-Eli Wallach sense, but a doll to play "daddy" with (gee, that still sounds sexual, doesn't it?). The dad tries to "man" William up by giving him manly games like baseball and marbles and badminton (badminton?). And William, Alan Alda is quick to point out, is good at all these games--no nancy boy, our Bill. But he still wants a doll. Only grandma is groovy enough to catch on to what William really wants--a chance to practice being a father, which is why little boys should be encouraged to play with dolls.

So I asked the kids after they saw it what they thought. "Guess William wants a doll," said one of the brighter ones. I asked them what they'd think if their son wanted a doll. Some of the girls were okay with it--if it were a baby as opposed to a Barbie or one of the Bratz. Some of the girls were dead set against the idea--MAYBE the kid could play with his sisters' dolls if the dolls happened to be lying around, but no way were they buying their son a doll. No such division among the boys--their sons were not playing with any freakin' dolls--it would be cool action figures or nothing.

So was "Free to Be You and Me" a bust? In some ways, it was. Despite Rosey Grier's best efforts, most boys (and their parents) do not believe it's all right to cry, and we don't all buy into the idea that gender roles need to be shaken or stirred. What's left is some nostalgia and some genuine entertainment. Listen to the not-quite-muppet babies arguing--one of them sounds like Mel Brooks, and he's hilarious. (Yes, the other baby is Marlo Thomas.) And when Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge and friends (and Marlo) are singing "Circle of Friends?" You know they've all just gotten high. And Billy deWolfe, one of the last of the old-time radio/movie/TV sissies-who-can't-quite-come-out (and one of whose last performances this was--you'd probably recognize his voice as the evil magician in "Frosty the Snowman") telling the crying kid that a sissy is someone who's afraid to cry because other people will think he's a sissy? How marvelously subversive. And, although for some reason they cut this in the Nick at Nite rebroadcast, there's a great bit with Dustin Hoffman performing Herb Gardner's monologue "How I Crossed the Street for the First Time All By Myself." Priceless. And Marlo's not in that one.

In the last analysis, as an agent of social change, Free to Be You and Me perhaps inevitably fell short. And there's a shitload of Marlo Thomas. But it's fun. And once you've seen "William Wants a Doll," just try to get that chorus out of your head.

shoop and the bye bye birdie camp

Bye Bye Birdie is back in its first ever Broadway revival since becoming what the current website refers to as a "sleeper" hit back in 1960. That production originally ran about a year and a half (607 performances), back when a show that ran a year and a half could still be called a smash. The current revival features John Stamos, Gina Gershon, and Bill Irwin in the roles created by Dick Van Dyke, Chita Rivera, and Paul Lynde (back then, Rivera got first billing). The revival's director, Robert Longbottom, has a lot of Good Ideas, like most professional directors do, but he had this to say about Bill Irwin playing the dad role that Lynde had played on stage and later in the 1963 film version--something to the effect of, we're going to rescue this role from the one of the campiest performances of all time.

Rescue a role from Paul Lynde? Seriously? Longbottom's statement displays a sad lack of understanding of 1) camp, 2) Paul Lynde, and 3) the show he happens to be reviving. First off, camp has two connotations, both germane in this case--one, the kind of winking, we know how silly and corny this is, but we're going to pretend to play it straight kind of attitude that dates back to such shows as Dames at Sea onstage and Batman on TV. The other not unrelated meaning refers to a distinctly gay sensibility meant to send up or comment upon seemingly "straight" material. Both meanings, and devices, are very helpful in putting on Bye Bye Birdie in the PROFESSIONAL theatre world, as opposed to the world where most of us found ourselves in or working on a production--community theatre and high school. (For the record, both Mrs. Shoop and I were in productions of Bye Bye Birdie in our respective youths--she as Rose, the lead, and me as Harvey Johnson, forever trying to hook up with Charity Garfein during the Telephone Hour number.)

In high school productions in particular, you put in a lot of the kids, you throw in the teachers and maybe the principal, and everybody gets a good laugh at everybody else. In fact, the kids get the last laugh, as it should be--they get their side of the "parents don't get it" humor from the show, plus they get to make fun of the music their parents and teachers used to like (or perhaps now, grandparents used to like) by pretending to go crazy for it. In the professional theatre world, as a recent Sunday Times article astutely pointed out, Bye Bye Birdie is a tougher proposition. Its too-innocent and too-square look at the Elvis phenomenon (already about 3 years out of date when the show opened) needed that "camp" sensibility to put the show's not entirely compatible parts (rock and roll spoof plus old-fashioned romance) in perspective. Enter Paul Lynde.

Lynde was campy before we had a word for it, hilarious if you got that he was gay, and still hilarious if you didn't. There's a moment during the 1969 (I think) Tony Awards where Lynde tears through a rendition of "Kids," sneering through the obvious lyrics and pulling laughs where they just shouldn't exist--it's amazing to watch. Or just listen to him yell, "Ed, I love you!" at the end of "Hymn for a Sunday Morning" (a tribute to Ed Sullivan) on the Broadway cast recording--the show needed that, and benefitted from it tremendously. And here's the thing--the show STILL needs that sensibility, now more than ever. Why? Because along with its goofy, square innocence, Bye Bye Birdie inadvertently predicted a number of cultural milestones, from the Beatles (mass teen hysteria) through Hair (rock music in the Broadway musical), and on through American Idol (the power of TV to create a musical celebrity). But you can't sell the show as being that clever about the future, any more than it was ever that clever about its recent past. The show itself was never meant to be, in the words of one of its parody rock and roll songs, "Honestly Sincere." It was, and is, a genial cartoon. A new production can't recreate Paul Lynde's distinctive (and, it's worth noting, often used in cartoons) voice, but to run away from it is to misunderstand what the show had going for it in the first place.

What this director needs to do is listen to Lynde voice some of his great cartoon creations for a day or two--say, Mildew Wolf, Templeton the Rat, and the Hooded Claw--plus throw in some Uncle Arthur from "Bewitched." Then he might realize that this "campiest performance of all time" is and will always be the heart and soul of Bye Bye Birdie.

shoop and really tasteless holocaust humor

This one was going to be about The Hangover, but I find that I have comparatively little to say about it. Don't get me wrong--it's funny as hell, with a brilliantly built script and hysterical comic turns from just about everybody. And as for Zach Galifianakis, there are just three words necessary--not since Belushi. (I almost put a period after each word, but that's a pre-adolescent, sub-literate habit which does no one any good.) The thing is, I'm so late getting to this one, it's not news to anybody. At some point, I might point to this movie again as a paragon of comic screenplay construction, but for now I want to focus on something that almost amounts to a throwaway line, but which nonetheless had me laughing hysterically, and then wondering about what I was laughing at.

One of the guys in The Hangover, Stu the dentist, laments the fact that he gave his grandmother's "Holocaust" ring to a stripper. Alan, Galifianakis' character, responds, "I didn't know they gave rings at the Holocaust." Now one thing upon which most of us agree is that there's absolutely nothing funny about the Holocaust. The systematic and methodical murder of millions still, and will forever, stand as one of mankind's most horrific atrocities.

So it takes some balls to make fun of it, or find humor in it. Such jokes, when they work, elicit those big, shocked, appalled laughs--initial disgust followed by sheer delight that you just don't get with most "did you ever notice..." jokes. How much Holocaust humor do I enjoy? It's worth thinking about...

1) Mr. Floppy, on "Unhappily Ever After"--this was not, I should state up front, an underrated or overlooked show. It was pretty stupid, but at its best, entertainingly so--never more so than when Bobcat Goldthwait, as Mr. Floppy's voice (he was a toy bunny), would go off on some tangent, the producers' admission that whatever the plot was, wasn't that important. At some point, Jack, the only member of the family who can talk to the bunny, mentions something about learning French. The only phrase you need to know in French, Mr. Floppy explains, is "blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's French for, 'The Jews are in the cellar. Please do not disturb the wine.'" Just plain wrong on so many levels--and hysterically funny.

2) The Producers--yes, the stage musical was, and remains, very funny. But the 1967 movie--just 22 years after the end of World War II--was a horrible lapse in taste. And two recognizably Jewish men putting on a musical that promised to give us "the Hitler with a song in his heart?" It's still hard to believe Mel Brooks went there. But he did, and the laughs are still remarkably potent.

3) Life is Beautiful--this one got a lot of backlash after its initial acclaim. Somehow, we found a lot to be embarrassed about--this simple movie with its message that sheer love and playful humor can overcome humanity's greatest evil seemed insultingly naive to those who gave the film serious second thoughts. Well, fuck second thoughts--this is Roberto Benigni's masterpiece.

Not many examples here, understandably. In a world where such atrocities can happen, and in the same world where so many people can deny that it ever happened, this is bitter, pungent humor, as excellent as it is rare.

shoop and short plays

I just finished participating in a short play festival in Manhattan. I've written a few 10-minute plays here and there, and I've seen a good many. The festival was fun, and it gave me a chance to work with some great actors (and great people, period) whom I hadn't seen in a while. It started me thinking about short plays in general. Not the "one-act," so much, which we generally think of as running a little longer, but in particular the 10-minute play. I realized I don't know all that much about them.

There are at least a couple of major showcases--the 10-minute festival at Louisville, and the collections that Samuel French publishes each year after productions in New York. Lately, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) has been publishing the plays from their play development workshops. It makes me wonder--are there any "classic" 10-minute plays? Any masterpieces? When we go see an evening of short-short plays, we expect unevenness. We expect a few that we like, which we praise with "cute" or "sweet" or "funny," along with some that rate as "okay," and some clunkers. So far as I know, we don't expect more than that. I wonder how great a 10-minute play can be.

I've noticed a few things. It's darn hard to pull off a serious 10-minute play. Things just have to happen too fast. If you played "Oedipus the King" in 10 minutes, it'd be funny. As for funny plays in 10-minutes, they often seem a lot like sketches. There's a difference, all right, but sometimes it can be blurry. Something else--some darn good actors get involved in these things. Actors' Equity actors, up-and-coming actors, some old, some fresh-faced, but all highly skilled. They want parts, and they want to act, and they'll go for the short play if they're not doing something else (often another short play). There must be something to the form that's appealing.

One of the first short-story collections I got through was one by John Cheever--he's not one of my all-time favorites, but I like "O Youth and Beauty," because it features a guy hurdling over furniture and meeting a pretty funny end, and "The Swimmer," where a guy swims a lot. My point is, in literature, there are acknowledged masters of the short form--the short story. Are there acknowledged masters of the 10-minute play? Would we read a collection?

At any rate, I'm going to look into this further. I might find out a few interesting things.