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.

shoop and dead Howard da Silva

Faulkner tells us that "memory believes before knowing remembers." (If you're a Faulkner fan, you're welcome. Now get out of here.) At any rate, I was thinking of that when I got to revisit a cherished memory--or really, the memory of somebody's memory. It involves my best friend, and a fairly notable dead character actor named Howard da Silva.

da Silva (ne Silverblatt) knocked around a long time on stage, film, and TV. He was the original Jud Fry in "Oklahoma!" in 1943--there's a "betcha didn't know." Dr. Who fans (I hear there are a lot of those) might know his voice as a sometime narrator. But for me, he was Ben Franklin--he'd played the role in "1776" onstage and in the movie (though you don't hear him on the original Broadway recording due to illness). When I was in middle school, our class trip was to see a screening of "1776," and we all laughed whenever the characters said something we thought was dirty. So for a while, I thought Howard da Silva was just about the funniest guy in the world, with his little jokes about the difference between an ox and a bull and his casual use of the term "bastard." When I saw the film again much later, I still thought it was terrific, though I started to wish da Silva didn't titter at his own witticisms quite so much. Still, I thought it was a fairly valid acting choice (Franklin probably did crack himself up), and when I thought of Ben Franklin, I thought he had to look and sound like da Silva (and certainly not Pat Hingle, who I saw in a pretty good Broadway revival. Oh, Hingle was fine, all right, but no way was he Franklin).

So I had considerable interest when, in college, my best friend told me about a film he saw on a class trip--da Silva was Franklin again, this time in a 20-minute educational film created around the nation's bicentennial. Apparently, if you were of a certain age and your class trip led you to Philadelphia, you pretty much had to see it. And my best friend had this way of making the film seem hilarious--in a way that's pretty hard to render into print. But he imitated da Silva emoting about the death of his young child "Frankie" and then veering very suddenly into brisk enthusiasm--"I had a son...he was born and died... and then I set to work on my printing press!!"--accompanied by jolly harpsichord music. And I knew that one day, I'd find myself in Philadephia and that I would see this film for myself.

It took many, many years. I moved to Philadelphia in mid-life, and I wondered if they still showed the film, and if so, where--the Franklin Institute? The Constitution Center? But I stumbled upon it on a trip to Franklin Court, where his old house and post office are recreated around Market and 3rd. And there was an underground museum much in need of funding where they show three films in rotation--the Disney cartoon "Ben and Me," which I vaguely remember kind of predicted "Ratatouille," where Ben is a nitwit and the mouse has all the answers; "The Real Ben Franklin," a somewhat more recent (the 90s) film narrated by a serious-folksy David Hartman; and "Portrait of a Family," with yes, the one, the only, Howard da Silva.

And there he was, mucking around with the printing press (he didn't invent the printing press, of course, but he was a printer and publisher), and then later, reminiscing about his family..."I had a son... he was born and died..." But no, not quite the hilarious jarring shift my friend had remembered. He then mentions the next child, Sarah, or Sally, and then maybe he talks about his stove...I'm not sure. It's a bad enough film, with da Silva allowed to emote and mug into the camera to his heart's content, and it's pretty obvious that none of the other actors are really in the film with him, but it wasn't quite as a funny as my friend's memory--or my memory of my friend's memory.

Still, I'll probably see "1776" again the next chance I get. And I do carry from the educational film my own little memory--da Silva looking impishly into the camera and saying, "Enter a proposal with your eyes open, and go through marriage with your eyes shut. [giggle, pause] You know what that's from, don't you? [wrinkles nose at us] Poor Richard's Almanac!" And then, I think, he should have set to work on his printing press. Maybe that's how I'll tell it one day.

shoop and world's greatest dad

This time, I'm afraid the build-up is going to greatly exceed the payoff--I promised word on the great movie I saw using the special "on demand" function that occasionally shows indie films that are still in theaters. That would be too bad, because "World's Greatest Dad" is a darkly funny, very sharp satire, and you ought to take a look.



George S. Kaufman probably would have taken back "Satire is what closes on a Saturday night" if he knew how many people were going to quote it. More to the point, satire dies a little bit every time somebody doesn't get it, or every time someone tries to be "satirical" and fails miserably. And both those things happen often, because satire is the biggest asshole of the arts--it tells you to your face that you're an idiot, and dares you to laugh at yourself. That's why satirists often hide behind a mask of geniality--it's easy to smile with mild amusement when it's lovable, folksy Pogo Possum saying, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." In our time, occasionally Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, Idiocracy) and those bad boys of South Park pull off some real satire, and now we can add Bobcat Goldthwait (now imagine Goldthwait saying that in his trademark strangled screech, which apparently he doesn't like doing anymore. Can't blame him--that had to hurt).



World's Greatest Dad features, among other elements, Robin Williams' best performance in, well, I'm not sure how long. His character is defeated and dejected--a disliked high school teacher and failed writer (that's almost redundant) scorned by his hilariously dim and profane son, patronized by his officious principal (props to Bobcat for casting old "Unhappily Ever After" co-star Geoff Pierson), and played by his much younger girlfriend. Williams inhabits the loser-figure fully, with no twinkling and no "inspired" riffs for the supporting characters to laugh at. His (very few) students stare at him blankly, and he's long given up any dreams he had of inspiring anybody. What turns Williams' fortunes around is the most horrible event a father can imagine--and the failed writer uses his skills to re-stage a incredibly stupid accident into cosmic tragedy. Suddenly, he has more students than he can handle, book deals, media attention, and the full sympathy and respect of musician Bruce Hornsby (it makes sense in context). It's dark, subversive, sometimes hilarious, and always very smart, even if you quibble with the perhaps too-redemptive ending.

Now I'll have to go back and check out "Shakes the Clown."

shoop and (500) days

I've seen two great movies lately--one in the theatre and one "on demand." At first I thought I'd tackle them both in one entry, but I think I'll divide them up. Because "(500) Days of Summer" got me thinking about romantic comedies in general, Zooey Daschenel in particular, and why this movie works so incredibly well.

You've probably noticed that without trying, you've seen a lot of trailers for a lot of "rom-coms." This despite the fact that by definition, this genre is really limited. The couple meets--yes, we can mix it up now with gay couples, but that doesn't make the situations any more fresh--they like each other, and there's an obstacle or two. And either they part ways (the occasional American indie and most European variations on the theme), or they stay (or get back) together--traditionally, what audiences tend to want. There's no way all of them can work, and many of them rightfully get ignored or shoot straight to DVD. So why are there so many in the course of a movie-going year?

The potential payoff is huge.

The rom-com is relatively cheap to produce, by Hollywood standards. So a $75-100 million take rocks everybody's world. And you never know when it's going to happen. Critics who have dismissed the last three "rom-coms" as "typical" all of a sudden write reviews that producers would write for themselves if they could, favorable word of mouth spreads, and bang! Big score for Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Was "The Proposal" that fresh and that funny? Well, it was fun. But the huge take came from nowhere. And sometimes, you don't need the critics to win. Shortly after "The Proposal" came "The Ugly Truth," which critics universally hated, and with two stars you wouldn't think anyone would want to see together (I'm having trouble remembering their names). Not as big a score as "The Proposal," but a solid score nonetheless. So when "(500) Days of Summer" promised something a little different, one had a right to be skeptical.

Terrific movie. Nor am I saying this simply because I've been crushing on Zooey D. since "Failure to Launch" (NOT since "Mumford," I should add. Yes, I saw "Mumford," but it was one of those movies that seemed to disappear as I was watching it, and I had no idea I was seeing anyone or anything special. I might or might not give it another chance one of these days). And not just because Joseph Gordon-Levitt nails the Hall and Oates number--a delirious song-and-dance sequence that echoes and trumps the musical number in "Enchanted." And not even because the movie makes L.A. romantic in a way that, say, "L.A. Story" failed to do, largely because the of the relative coldness of the two leads, Steve Martin and that actress who used to be with Steve Martin. There's a slew of great ideas and shrewd writing in this film--it would justify its existence if it only proved that guys get together and obsess about girls the way girls do with guys (something my wife didn't know. Oh, yes, hon, we surely do). The kicker, though, is how the two leads relate to each other--they really seem to enjoy each other's company. Amazing concept. And if you think about rom-coms that work, there's the common denominator.

It also helps that "(500) Days of Summer" has one of the coolest last lines ever. Wait for it, and smile.

shoop and the dead telethon

The Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon was a major milestone for me as a kid. It not only put the final nail in summer's coffin, but it helped me to learn to be concerned for People With Problems. Growing up, you either pretty much had to watch it, since nothing else was on, or you had to do something else, like go outside or read a book.

Watching it this year was just sad. Ed McMahon's gone, and Jerry himself didn't make an appearance while I was watching--just a bunch of co-hosts with whom I'm not familiar. The contrast was that much more glaring when they showed clips from old telethons for the Las Vegas lead-ins. There was Jerry, doing that matchless goofball physical shtick with the Russian boys folk choir, or even trading weak jokes with Milton Berle. And you see what's missing: Old Show Biz. Between the public service announcements and the presentation of various checks from 7-11 management and Knights of Columbus officers, you had all of Jerry's friends and acquaintences from radio, TV, the Catskills, and Vegas, doing their stuff. There was Norm Crosby and his malapropisms, which always made Dad crack up. There were Sinatra and Sammy, and Charo doing her cootchie-cootchie thing. And major movie stars and up-and-coming performers wanted to be there, too. Sometimes you were actually watching it to see a favorite performer--that didn't always work out, because they might have been on past your bedtime, or worse, they might have been on during the local cut-aways (I'll always remember my disappointment as the show returned to Vegas just in time to see the Hudson Brothers making their exit.)

And now? Not even Disney or Nickelodeon stars show up. The anonymous hosts pass the introductions back and forth as they make no impression whatsoever. Jerry could be obnoxious and in-your-face, and he sang way too much for his (or the viewers') own good, but he certainly made an impression. I paid up as I usually do, but it's not the same.

Let's hear tympani, Ed.