Update on Sunday’s Bout

Doug Henwood, our previously announced representative of the left for Sunday’s debate, has chickened out (bok! bok! bok!) under the mistaken impression, I surmise, that as a former libertarian I’d be skewing the event against him. But the fact remains that I am also a former socialist, have written several appreciative articles about the protest community for papers like the Village Voice and others, and that the event will be at Theater for the New City, one of the last bastions of pure leftism in the entire city. One thing this event will have is balance.

 

Fortunately, Stanley Aronowitz has stepped up to the plate, and the left will be very well represented. He’s a prof at CUNY Graduate Center, the director  of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work, and the author of 25 books. His full dossier is here: http://www.stanleyaronowitz.org/new/about

 

Mr. Dobrian will no doubt have his hands full.

 

Blood sport? Nah – I only jest about that. In reality, I’m hoping one of these guys can help me make up my mind.

 

One fence – two utopias. Smells like the old Berlin!

 

Join us this Sunday (Nov 22.) won’t you, following the 3pm performance of Kitsch. For more info, go here: www.theaterforthenewcity.net.

The “Hideous Exuberance” of Steve Bird

I first knew Steve Bird as one of the principal, demented faces around the old Collective Unconscious. His work was always a heady cocktail of honey and bile, simultaneously intoxicating and disgusting, as all good liquor is. His new book Hideous Exuberance gives readers the pleasure of getting inside that disturbed head in the privacy of the home — and a sordid thrill it is.

 

Picture Winesburg, Ohio if it had been written by an inmate of a criminal insane asylum. The book is structured as a chain of bizarre character portraits of surreal specimens with names like Alison Shitbox and Gondolphus Clownhouse. The opening sections read like revenge salvoes against a gallery of grotesques who probably made Bird’s life a living hell during his formative years. Trailer trash bimbos rule this universe – Anna Nicole Smith meets Eva Peron (and when you get right down to it, they’re not so different). As the work progresses it gets at once more erudite and increasingly less coherent, as though the author had consumed the works of Heironymous Bosch, John Waters, Richard Wagner, Mark Leyner, Kurt Vonnegut, the Marquis de Sade, Rabelais, William S. Burroughs, Alfred Jarry, both Sedarises, and the Bards who sang Beowulf, vomited these works uo up, and was now serving the upchuck to us, chilled, in parfait cups.

 

Scatology is an important quiver in Bird’s arsenal. More than one character embraces “German shit porn”, and eats “hot brown poo pie”. This reviewer confesses to relishing such phrases in comedy so long as they remain phrases; I am nonetheless relieved the book is not a photo essay. And, as in the work of Mark Leyner, it as the level of the phrase or the sentence that Hideous Exuberance soars. Try to follow it as a plot and you will go just as insane as the author. But the smaller chunks are saturated with an inventiveness that is downright hyperactive. The work is rife with Joycean coinages all Bird’s own — and he sticks to them like the obsessive compulsive that he obviously is. Jesus is invariably rendered as ”Jah-heesus”. Evangelist as “Evilangelist”. America, for some reason, as “America Profunda”. The Feast of Fools meets Armageddon in this ungodly, God-like work. What emerges is a damning portrait of humanity in all its hypocritical splendor: venal, weak, and ingenious in its depravity. I therefore judge it as a highly moral work, a fiction of singular realism. I think it should be on the reading list of every 11-year old in the country – not because that is the level of its humor (though it is, and woe to those who are not 11 at least in sprit) but because 11 is also the age of understanding, and the book contains so many worthwhile lessons. Hideous Exuberance indeed.

For info on how to get this comico-religious work of scat porn, go here: http://www.voxpoppublishing.com/authors.php

 

Kitsch Pix

As we head into our second week of performances, we have much to show and tell. First this great review from the grandiloquent Adam McGovern: http://blog.comiccritique.com/?p=137. A review in Nytheatre.com is expected any day, as is a photo spread in the Villager/Downtown Express constellation of papers. And herewith, photodocumentary recordings of der gang in performance (photos by Bane):

Michael Whitney as Nazi official Krauss; Gyda Arber as the maternity nurse:

Avery Pearson as Heinz the piano queen:

Roger Nasser as Hanswurst (far right) and rest of cast in the Klub Katzenratzen:

Esther Silberstein as Schwamm sings while gang looks on:

Pete Macnamara as The Baboon throws a drunk (Aaron Baker):

4 spies from East Germany: (Trav S.D., Roger Nasser, Pete Macnamara, Josh Mertz)

Josh Mertz as Agent Vogelbaum encounters Mrs. Bruderlieben (Michele Schlossberg-Cwiklik):

Two cool shots of Esther Silberstein as Schwamm:

Agents Geldhund and Milchstein (Trav S.D. and Pete Macnamara) meet up with Lulu (Kate Valentine):

A Baboon (Pete Macnamara) crosses paths with a snake (Michael Whitney):

The Chief Agent (Trav S.D.) tries to put the moves on his twin brother’s sister-in-law (Betsy Head):

The guys at the bar:

The big climax (Audrey Crabtree center):

We hope you’ll come see the other 9000 moments in the show that weren’t photographed. Her’s how: www.theaterforthenewcity.net/Kitsch

Cashel Byron’s Profession

My illustrious ex reports that the Ithaca College is presenting a reading of Robert Moss’s adaptation of Shaw’s fourth novel Cashel Byron’s Profession. The selection has special meaning for us — we liked the name of the book’s hero so much we gave it to our oldest son. Cashel Byron, like Mrs. Warren, has a sordid “profession”…in this case performing not sex, but violence, to earn his way. He is, in short, a social-climbing pugilist. Sex, violence, money. That Shaw was a sensationalist. The reading will be perfomed tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m. and Friday at 5 p.m. in Studio Two of the Dillingham Center on the Ithaca College campus. I just know all you New Yorkers will want to make the six hour drive to go see it!

Stars of Vaudeville #80: Frank Fay

FRANK FAY

 

“Of all the great vaudevillians, I admired Frank the most” — James Cagney.

 

Almost all of the great comedians speak with reverence about Frank Fay. He originated the stand-up comedy style we associate with Hope, Benny, Carson, Leno and Letterman, the extremely polished “American Institution” style, an unspoken confidence that says “an army of people made me possible.” You might call such performers “comc laureates”, almost branches of the U.S. government. As opposed to the more burlesquey Milton Berle-Henny Youngman-Rodney Dangerfield approach, these are not men who take or deliver a pie in the face, cross their eyes, or say “take my wife, please”. What they do is tell America the jokes they will repeat around the water cooler at work the next day. While there was no t.v. in Fay’s heyday, he was the king of the Palace, the flagship theatre of the top vaudeville chain in the nation.

 

There was much to set Fay apart. Unlike most vaudevillians, Fay was no populist. He cultivated the aloof arrogance of the aristocrat – his trademark was the barbed put-down delivered on the spot with dependable lethalness. That is what audiences prized him for.

He was charming, dashing, and impeccably dressed, with a broad handsome Irish face something like the actor Ralph Fiennes’. He had a very distinctive, swishy style of walking that was almost effeminate, but it was so effective that both Bob Hope and Jack Benny emulated it to their dying day. [Surely Hope will pass on by the time this goes to press].

 

He generally finished his act with a sardonic version of “Tea for Two”, wherein he would stop every few bars in order to tear the song apart:

 

Tea for two, and two for tea (spoken: ) Ain’t that rich! Here’s a guy that has enough tea for two. So he’s going to have tea for two. I notice that he doesn’t say a word about sugar!

 

Well, it ain’t exactly Duck Soup, but with his wavy hair, straight teeth and twinkling eyes, one gets the feeling that fay sold his jokes through charm.

 

He was born in San Fransisco in 1897 to vaudevillian parents. He played his first part at age three in a Chicago production of Quo Vadis? His first vaudeville act was the team of Dyer and Fay, but it must have been pretty awful: Fay later downplayed his involvement with it. By 1918 he had established himself as a monologist, and by 1919 he played the Palace. “The Great Faysie”, as he styled himself, was appallingly successful on the vaudeville stage. To play the Palace – at all — was the very highest aspiration of most vaudevillians. A select handful ran a week there. In 1925, Fay ran ten weeks. So he might be a little forgiven if it went to his head.

 

But there is something to the old adage that what lives longest are not words but deeds. Today Frank Fay lives on in the recorded memory as a notorious S.O.B. and a mean drunk, with nary a kind anecdotal word from anyone who knew him. Milton Berle once said, “Fay’s friends could be counted on the missing arm of a one-armed man.”

An early example of the arrogance that was to overshadow his reputation throughout his career occurred at this early stage. In the incident, which became notorious throughout theatrical circles, Fay let the audience wait several minutes while he struggled to tie his tie in the dressing room. “Let ‘em wait!” he apparently snapped at the stage manager, establishing a tradition that would not be revived until rock and roll was invented forty years later.

 

Fay didn’t go in for slapstick. He used to taunt Bert Lahr by saying  “Well, well, well, what’s the low comedian doing today?” Fay’s bag was verbal wit, and he pulled no punches, offtstage or on. To Berle’s challenge to a battle of wits on one occasion, Fay famously said, “I never attack an unarmed man.”

 

Apparently, Fay had one of those smirking faces that’s just itching to be smacked. On one occasion, he attempted to humiliate bert wheeler by dragging him onto the stage unprepared, and firing off a bunch of rehearsed lines at him to which he was supposed to attempt rejoinders. Tired of such treatment, Wheeler unnnerved him by remaining silent the whole time. when fay finally cracked and said “what’s the matter? why don’t you say something?” Wheeler said “You call these laughs? I can top these titters without saying a word” and smacked him on the face – to howls from the audience. Some riun-ins were far less light-hearted. Milton Berle recalled having watched Fay perform backstage from the wings, which is a real no-no with some performers. Berle heard him say “get that little jew bastard out of the wings” and something about “that little kike”, so (according to him) he grabbed a stage brace and busted open Fay’s nose with it. Lou Clayton also let him have it across the jaw for his smart mouth.

 

Even when fay meant to be nice he was rotten. Introducing Edgar Bergen for his first Palace date, he said: “The next young man never played here before, so let’s be nice to him.” As any performer can tell you, such an introduction is patronizing at best, sabotage at worst.

 

Bastard or not, Fay’s vaudeville success led to several Broadway shows during the years 1918-33. He even wrote and produced two starring vehicles for himself (a la Ed Wynn): Frank Fay’s Fables (1922) and Tattle Tales (1933).

 

Through his friend Oscar Levant, Fay met and married Barbara Stanwyck, then a young chorus girl who’d just gotten her first Broadway show (Burlesque, 1927) In 1929 they did a dramatic sketch, as “Fay and Stanwyck” at the Palace. Later that year, they were called to Hollywood, so Frank could star in the film Show of Shows. Fay and Stanwyck’s marriage and their experience in Hollywood later became the basis of a Hollywood movie – A Star is Born.

 

In Hollywood, as everywhere he went, Fay did not make a lot of friends. A standard joke of the time went “who’s got the biggest prick in Hollywood?” Answer: Barbara Stanwyck. The womanizing, alcoholic Fay’s career floundered, while Stanwyck’s flourished for decades. In 1935 the two were divorced, and Fay continued his downward spiral, until 1944, when he was chosen to play Elwood P. Dowd in the original Broadway production  of Harvey.

Fred Allen said: “The last time I saw Frank Fay he was walking down lover’s lane holding his own hand.” He passed away in 1961, a humbler, and, one hopes, a wiser man.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Capitalism vs. Communism: The Rematch

In which we ask the heretical question: Is the East Better Off?

The older I get the more convinced I am that humanitarianism — and not politics — is the proper dimension for artists to exist in. Artists (if they are any good) are too passionate, too radical, and yes, too creative. The Fascist countries were all run by artists, and artists helped create the awful tyranny that was the Soviet Union. Still…we can’t seem to help ourselves.

The first thing I did when I moved to NYC was to become a card carrying member of some left wing parties that will remain nameless. I now consider it one of the foolish mistakes of youth. My head was full of Odets and Brecht…but those guys were just writers and their beliefs really just poetry. The reality is so very different. The socialist newsletters I began receiving in the mail generally turned my stomach and made me grit my teeth — so much about it made my flesh crawl. This is funny, because most of my friends are of the left, and I find myself drawn to the personalities of those on the far left, even if I generally disagree with their beliefs. I like their passion and their craziness. I love their theatricality. I just happen to think it would be a disaster to put any of their ideas into practice.

Not long after scrubbing myself of pink, I went very far in the opposite direction. There were a variety of precipitating causes. First, I worked in a bank as a receptionist; I read their periodicals (The Economist, the Wall Street Journal) all day, and to my surprise I found them to be more persuasive than evil. Then I worked in a bookstore for three years, and was assigned to the history and political science sections. And I read pretty much every book in my section….all the classics of economics, political science, America’s founding documents. And this experience lead me to become a passionate convert to Classical Liberalism, better known as libertarianism. This is as radical a philosophy as socialism. I often think of it as anarchism plus cops. For over a decade I was a true believer, I wrote many pieces about it in my ‘zine The Herald of Freedom, I wrote for the libertarian magazines Reason and Liberty.

But my faith in this philosophy was shaken, too, when I saw what untrammeled capitalists in action can be capable of. I had some personal encounters with characters of this type; and of course we all  read the newspapers. I do believe some kind of comeuppance is always appropriate when people are arrogant, greedy, and callous. And if it’s a government that has to inflict it, than so be it. (The question then becomes, who’ll inflict the comeuppance on the government when IT becomes arrogant, greedy and callous, not to mention inept?)

At any rate, I don’t know what the hell I am now, besides one of those American cranks like H.L. Mencken or William Randolph Hearst, whose eccentric beliefs are thrown into a shopping cart from craziest places in the supermarket. Unlike most people I know, I inherited no coherent belief system. My father, who was to the right of Herman Goering, came from an unbroken chain of Dixiecrats, but was a Nixon and Reagan Republican. My mother came from an unbroken chain of New England Republicans but was a staunch working class Democrat. On my Facebook page, I now list myself as “Pragmatist”.

You might say I am an equal opportunity pessimist. I like to think it adds depth and complexity to my work. I’m afraid it leaves some people (ones who like things nice, easy, digestible) scratching their heads. I want to see the humanity in bad people, and the evil in good ones.  I have a strong hatred of totalitarianism in all its forms, past, present and future…but I also admit to having a somewhat Puritanical dislike for what I consider decadence and superficiality in affluent society (my particular bugaboos are trends, fashion, ostentation, and downright waste ). This comes out in a roundabout way in Kitsch. The typical thing for most writers to do is either to attack totalitarianism, OR to make fun of the excesses of a decadent culture. I find that the human predicament is to be forever pendulating between both extremes. It’s why my favorite play is The Bacchae.

Anyway, this coming Sunday we will have the sadistic pleasure of watching a libertarian and a leftist go at it hammer and tongs. Following the 3pm performance of Kitsch, we’ll have a debate moderated by yours truly, in which we argue who has the better position.

The Libertarian is Joseph Dobrian, this year’s Libertarian Party candidate for Mayor of New York City:

More info on Mr. Dobrian here

And for the left, we have Doug Henwood, (host of WBAI’s Behind the News, contributing editor to The Nation and editor/publisher of the Left Business Observer):

More on Mr. Henwood here

Come See the Big Dust-up

November 22, following the

3pm performance of

Kitsch, or Two for the Price of One

Free with your ticket to Kitsch

Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave (between 9^th and 10^th)

More info: www.theaterforthenewcity.net/kitsch or 212-254-1109

Stars of Vaudeville #79: Walker and Williams

Today is Bert Williams’ birthday.

 

George Walker and Bert Williams are important figures not only in show business history, but American cultural history, as well. Williams, the more gifted and longer-living of the two, was the Jackie Robinson of American show business, and in his theme-song “Nobody” (lyrics by Alex Rogers), left the world with a standard that’s still being covered today (e.g. by Johnny Cash on his American III: Solitary Man album).

 

When life seems full of clouds and rain

And I am full of nothin but pain,

Who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain? Nobody!

 

When winter comes with snow and sleet

And me with hunger and cold feet,

Who says, “Here’s 25 cents, go and get something to eat?” – Nobody

 

The supreme irony is that while Williams is the most famous black man to come out of vaudeville (apart from Bill Robinson), he was by ancestry mostly caucasian. His paternal grandfather was the Dutch Consul in Antigua, West Indies. His paternal grandmother and his mother were both quadroons—one quarter black. This would make Williams something like 3/16 African, but in the racist world that he was to inherit, that was enough to make his life a supreme challenge.

 

He was born Egbert Austin Williams in the year 1874. In 1885, the family moved to California. As a teenager, Williams hoped to go to Stanford University. He became an entertainer to raise money to pay for his tuition. Because he had no experience, theatres wouldn’t book him. He started out in the rough-and-tumble world of Barbary Coast saloons instead, where his poise, dignity and class were only handicaps. An 1893 tour of lumber camps where he performed skits and songs fared hardly better. In these years, he gradually had the horrifying revelation that he was the victim of the racist expectations of the audience and that, in order to be a success, he would have to stoop to portraying the sort of low stereotype that white people expected. While Williams was light-complexioned, African features predominated – to the audience he was a “black man”, and in America, “black men” behaved a certain way. The problem was that Williams was well-educated, upper middle-class, and sophisticated. To make a success in show business, he actually had to struggle to learn what was to him an alien dialect and mannerisms.

 

In these early years, Williams displayed few of the gifts for which he was later distinguished, was no great shakes as a singer, dancer, musician (he played banjo) or comedian, yet his high intellegence managed to carry him through. With his evolving new “darky” persona (which undoubtedly galled him), he started getting his first decent bookings, first a few months at the San Francisco Museum, then with Martin and Seig’s Mastodon Minstrels.

 

It is at this early and embryonic juncture that Williams met George Walker, who was a year younger than Bert, but already a veteran of minstrel and medicine shows. The two hit it off and worked up an act. George sang a song “See Yer Colored Man”, while Bert played banjo. Bert was the straight man in their first crude comedy routines. For nearly two years (1893-95) the two performed their songs and skits at Jack Halahan’s Cramorne Theatre (later known as the Midway Plaisance.)

 

When the pair heard about a successful show in Chicago called The Octoroon that was hiring black performers, they decided to take their chances and move there in hopes they could bluff their way in. Their plan was to work their way east with a travelling medicine show. The scheme was rudely interrupted in Texas by a lynch mob, however, who were offended by Walker and Williams’ flashy, expensive clothes (which, by the way, were a professional necessity for vaudevillians). The mob tore off their clothes and gave them burlap sacks to wear. The good “doctors” of the medicine show did not defend them, and so they were left naked and penniless to make their way to the next town. How they managed to do so is not recordrd for posterity. After this incident, the boys vowed never to work the South again, a promise on which they made good.

 

Miraculously, they managed to make it to Chicago and get a week’s try-out in The Octoroon – but they flopped and were let go. The set-back provided them with an opportunity to take stock of their act and decide on some improvements. In the next few months, they developed the basic characteristics of the act that would make them world famous.

 

First, Williams bit the bullet and decided to black up. It was common for African Americans to wear blackface in those days. In fact, that was how blacks broke into show business in the first place, by performing in minstrel shows as “genuine coons”. As with so many performers, the blackface seemed to work a miracle on the naturally shy and introverted Williams – it released his inhibitions and freed him up to be funny. He finally let go of his dignity (which is a fine thing for a man to possess, but a handicap for a clown), and started going for the bellylaughs. The character he became known for was a loser, a sort of shabby pessimistic everyman in threadbare clothes, or as he sang in one of his more popular songs, “The Jonah Man” – the guy to whom everything bad happens. In contrast, Walker was a flashy dude in smart clothes, a ladies’ man, a talker, a schemer, the eternal optimist, and the motivating force behind the plots of all their stories. The two characters, of course, were exagerations of the men’s actual personalities.

 

Billed as “Two Real Coons”, the two travelled with their constantly improving act starting in 1896. In 1898 they were spotted by a scout in French Lick Indiana and tapped to perform in a Broadway show The Gold Bug which lasted one week. A succession of prestige vaudeville gigs followed, though: Koster & Bial’s, Proctor’s, Hammerstein’s Olympia, Tony Pastor’s Music Hall, the Keith Circuit. They were credited with introducing the cakewalk to mainstream America in their act, a popular dance which evolved from the minstrel show walkaround. Comical dancing became a highlight of their act, Walker high-stepping and lively, Williams, shuffling and clumsy.

 

In 1898, they toured with “Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk”, a book musical that further helped to legitimize african Americans on stage. They followed this up with a tour of “A Lucky Coon” , a sort of compendium of their minstrel bits, in 1899.

 

In 1901, Walker and Williams made history by becoming the first black recording artists, and the cylinders they cut sold well enough to put them among the first black best-sellers. Walker and Williams went on to star in and produce many important musicals over the next few years, including The Sons of Ham (1901), In Dahomey, the first all-black musical to open on Broadway (1902-05), and Bandanaland (1908). In 1903, Walker and Williams became the first African Americans to give a command performance for an English Monarch (Edward VII). George Bernard Shaw said of their performance: “the best acting now in London is that of Williams and Walker in In Dahomey.”

 

In 1905, Williams started singing Nobody, which was to be his theme song.

 

When I was in that railroad wreck

And thought I’d cashed in my last check

Who took that engine off my neck? Hm…not a soul…

 

In 1908, Walker contracted syphllis, which in those days was without a treatment. By 1909, the condition was affecting his performance and though he struggled valiantly to control the symptoms, he began to stutter, forget his lines, and lose his motor control on stage. That year, he retired from the act. By 1911, he was dead.

 

For a brief while, his wife Ada Overton Walker (a dancer who had performed with the team for years), went on as his replacement in drag. After a period of uncertainty, Williams developed a solo act, and in so doing, revealed himself to be one of the great comic artists of the 20^th century. In addition to his classic character songs like Nobody with their distinctive mix of pathos and humor, he also told dialect stories, (or “lies” as he called them) in the great tradition of african American folklore, and pantomime, which he claimed to have learned in Europe from a man named Pietro. His “poker routine”, in which he silently portrayed every player in a card game, conveying several distinct characters right down to what hand each man was holding, was legendary (and, luckily, was preserved on film). He toured the country in vaudeville with this material, almost never receiving the top billing he deserved because of the prejudice of the times, although there times when he was next to closing at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue and Hammerstein’s. From now, through the rest of his life, Williams was in the strange position of being hailed as a genius, universally beloved and respected by his colleagues, adored by his audiences…yet forced to leave the theatre by the back door, stay in separate “colored” hotels and boarding houses (in towns that had them), and avoid local troublemakers (including law enforcement officers) who relished making life hell for “uppity” negroes. A touching anecdote has Joe Keaton finding himself sitting at the same bar with Williams and noticing that they are opposite ends. “Come down and have a drink with me, Bert,” Keaton offered. But the bar was segregated and Williams was at the black end, so he mumbled an embarrrassed but polite refusal, and Keaton, realizing the situation, came down to his end of the bar to join him.

 

In 1910, Williams became the first major black star in motion pictures, a series of one-reel silent shorts for Biograph. In 1911, Zeigfeld hired him for his Follies – the first black to be so honored. When most of the cast threatened to leave, Zeigfield is reported to have said, “Go if you want to. I can replace everyone of you, except the man you want me to fire.”  Though getting his foot in the door at Zeigfeld’s was an achievement, it didn’t spell the end of racism in his life. In the show, while given many chances to shine, they were plenty of times when the roles he was given to play were an unfortunate reflection of the attitudes of the times: red caps, cab drivers, or some other type of lackey to his white co-stars were the typical parts given to this grandson of a diplomat. In 1914, he headlined at the Palace, another first for an African American, and the very pinnacle of success for a vaudevillian. Perhaps it was such triumph that gave him the serenity of mind to best a racist bartender in St. Louis. In a not-too-subtle effort to oust Williams from the bar on account of his skin color, the barkeep attempted to charge him $50 for a glass of gin. Williams calmly put a $500 bill down on the bar and said,  “I’ll have ten of them.” On another occasion, Lionel Barrymore was backstage watching Williams work, and a stagehand came up and said, “Like him, huh?” Barrymore said, “Yes, he’s terrific.” Just as Williams got offstage the stage hand said loudly, “Yeah, he’s a good nigger, knows his place.” and Williams said, “Yes. A good nigger. Knows his place. Going there now. Dressing room ONE!”

 

His last years were spent working the Follies, the Frolics and the Keith vaudeville circuit, but by the late teens his health began to fail. He died of a combination of heart failure and pneumonia while performing in Under the Bamboo Tree,­ a Shubert show in Detroit.   He was only 47.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

WWI and Vaudeville (an Armistice Day post)

We who have not felt the sting of a proper World War in 64 years cannot appreciate the deuced inconvenience such a development can be, especially where important matters like show business are concerned. Prior to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, successful British and American entertainers spent a good deal of their time on boats. Performers like Houdini, Will Rogers and W.C. Fields literally had steamer trunks with customs stamps from the great world capitals plastered on them. When the shooting started, all that dried up. Americans were deprived of their favorite British Music Hall stars for the most part; though some brave Americans continue to travel to the embattled countries. Some, like the indefatigable Elsie Janis traveled right into the war zones to entertain the troops.

Patriotism in the era amounted to a mania. Prior to America’s entry into the conflict, thespians like Alla Nazimova could present pacifist playlets in the vaud houses. Once we entered the war, such messages were out; Irving Berlin’s “Over There” was more in keeping with the times. As will happen in wartime, even the most heterogenous cultual institution of all — vaudeville — spoke with a single voice on this issue. Shortly after America joined the war, George M. Cohan called a special meeting of vaudevillisn to see who would join the war effort. Every hand shot up.Vaudeville vets like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks did their part by crisscrossing the nation selling millions in war bonds. And some were to pay the ultmate price. Vernon Castle, one-half of the nation’s premier dance team enlisted in the RAF (he was Canadian) and died in a crash.

The official Armistice, 88 years ago today, was to result in the usual post-war boom. This one brought a flood of entrepreneurial capital that was to result in investments in new entertainment media like network radio andtalking pictures…and thus the end of vaudeville.

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #78: Joe Penner

Joe Penner inadvertently illustrated a vaudeville pitfall by being a one-horse comic, beating the horse to death, and then beating the dead horse. To be more accurate, he was a one duck comic. He struggled along in vaudeville for years without distinguishing himself as a dialect comedian. Gradually he developed a character with the power to amuse by offering to sell preposterous articles, “Wanna buy a [something or other].” Through experimentation, he learned that he got the biggest laugh by saying “Wanna buy a duck?” He was able to milk this schtick for a couple of years in vaudeville, then introduced it on radio on Rudy Vallee’s show, where it made a national sensation. After a couple of years of this, though, no one wanted to buy the duck anymore. Unfortunately, this bit was the only weapon in his arsenal. In 1941, God apparently asked him “Wanna buy a farm?” He did.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

OF BALLYHOO AND BEACH BALLS

Imagine my consternation in the early days of Willy Nilly when a short green bus pulled up to the curb in front of Dixon Place, and a slobbering mob of propeller hat-wearing troglodytes began to stumble toward the theatre, a spectacle reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

“Those can’t be the critics!,” I cried, clutching my director’s hand until he fainted from a loss of blood circulation. But alas, they were. Our suspicions were confirmed when we saw that some of the creatures held memo pads and number two pencils in their trotters.

 

By the time the dust had settled several weeks later, we were satisfied. Several critical voices –a couple of them major – expressed delight at what we’d labored so hard to bring them, and we wound up with a page and a half of superlative pull-quotes. Ah, but those first couple of nights! It was as though we’d been set upon by a coalition of the blind, the deaf, and the stupid (but unfortunately not the dumb). The unkindest cuts came from a couple of second tier scribblers from two of New York’s top ranking critical organs, who brought their prodigious storehouses of cultural knowledge and keen descriptive powers to bear in the service of deriding a wayward beach ball, which had managed to accidentally bounce from the set into the audience on opening night. This ball was apparently a sort of bete noir to these critics, possessing all the malevolence of Moby Dick. Like toddlers, or perhaps kittens, they were mesmerized by it. It was the sun around which their reviews revolved. Like fops of the Restoration, each scrutinized the ball down his nose through a pince nez, laughing the ball to scorn. Unfortunately (for me), somewhere behind, underneath, around the ball – unnoticed — there had been a play.

 

This is the story of my life. The independent theatre artist, of necessity, must wear many hats in order to bring his work before the public. In my convoluted career, I’ve learned something of marketing, and I’ve found it to be a double edged sword that cuts deep.  I have serious things I want to say. I express these ideas through comedy. And then I get out there and start selling. And the hard selling I do almost always backfires in the end. Part of the audience, expecting the unchallenging spectacle the hype seems to promise, exits the theatre disappointed and perplexed. (Hey, man, what was that? That was just weird!) Another part takes the hype at its word and watches the play through the jaded lenses I myself have ground. This bunch never does see the play. They merely confirm what they’ve already decided based on the marketing material. In sum, rather than looking with their eyes, they believe just what they have already been told. It is especially depressing when purported theatre critics are guilty of that level of superficiality; but it turns out most of them are.

 

With Willy Nilly, director Jeff Lewonczyk and myself, by joint consent, decided to announce the show as an “exploitation” and mirror the techniques of the mainstream media apparatus in cravenly making entertainment out of murder. By doing so, we hoped to make people think. Our hype almost always serves a double function – genuine marketing, and a simultaneous parody of marketing. This time out, the promotions fulfilled their more quotidian agenda. Filling the houses turned out to be no problem, at least on the initial run. But the bit about getting audiences to think is a tough nut to crack. As a general rule, it turns out audiences and critics believe everything they’re told – hook, line and sinker. If you paint a canvas entirely red and call it “A Study in Blue”, damned if they won’t see the blue – and only the blue – in it. We announce a work of exploitation, and many reviewers therefore leave their critical faculties at the door. (Others, perhaps, never possessed such faculties to begin with). The result: a passel of reviews that ought to be more embarrassing to their authors than the admittedly uneven play should be to its creators. Certain of their lapses amount to critical malpractice. Thus, for example, the lyrics to Willy Nilly’s opening song “Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud Cuckoo-land” (the title of which is a Joycean style portmanteau phrase compressing “psychedelic mushroom”, “mushroom cloud” and Aristophanes’ “cloud-cuckoo land”)  “failed to impress” one reviewer. To another, the climax of the show (which illustrated social breakdown by setting a Living Theatre style contact improv to a sonic collage modeled on “Revolution #9”) “just fell apart”. A number of these whiz kids demonstrated a lack of awareness of pop culture so great that they plainly had never heard of either Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Tiny Tim – phenomena at the pinnacle of mainstream prominence at the time of the play’s events (youth is no excuse for such a level of ignorance—at least not in someone who presumes to don the mantle of critic). By the same token, a few equated the presence of a square, deadpan narrator with Rod Serling (apparently the only such character they’ve encountered) rather than Jack Webb or the hundred or so other white-sock wearing cop and D.A. types more germane to Willy Nilly.

And, as always seems to be the case, the play’s more serious underlying themes went completely unnoticed, even by the show’s many champions. Even a page and a half long monologue of deadly earnest content justifying the author’s intentions (a blatantly Euripidean device I often resort to, one that would make Neitzche spin in his grave) failed to clue scribblers in. All I can do is take solace in the fact that comical writers with serious aims are rarely “gotten” the first time around. To Shaw’s contemporaries, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was just a scandalous play about hookers. Unless you announce yourself as serious, and then act serious, and then shove your serious intentions down people’s throats and up their asses, most people will only register the foolishness. If you think this maddening predicament isn’t what inspired Moliere to write The Misanthrope, you’ve got another thing coming.

 

Moliere knew his misanthrope from the inside; he thought the character’s dark thoughts at times, or he couldn’t have written them. But he also possessed the wisdom not to give in to despair. Cooler heads prevail in the play, and Moliere went on to write many other brilliant comedies. We profit by his example by climbing back into the saddle with Kitsch, which opens at Theater for the New City on November12. It is a farce, based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s Twin  Menaechmi by way of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. We hope audiences will merely enjoy themselves. It is a machine to make people laugh. In fact, we hope audiences never bother themselves with this essay. It will ruin the show for them.

 

On the other hand, we hold critics to a higher standard. We hope they will bring to the table more than a superficial working knowledge of Top 40 theatrical hits.

 

A familiarity with ancient comedy would help; the play derives more from Plautus (by way of translation) than from Shakespeare. The play’s main architecture is classical: it is divided into five acts, and maintains a careful geometric organization of characters and events that owes more than a little to Aristotle.

 

A knowledge of the early works of Brecht would also assist the critic. (Happy End and St. Joan of the Stockyards were particular inspirations). Young Brecht was a parodist. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and even Bach, his technique early on was to vacuum up cultural products and glue them into his theatrical vehicles; so much so that he was often accused of plagiarism. Yet Brecht was a man of his time and place. In fact, he is the foremost advocate of a theatre oppositional to classical values, even to our own times. Like Eisenstein and Meyerhold before him, he sought a way to theatricalize the Hegelian dialectic; his Epic theatre would build not to some single satisfying climax as in the Aristotelean theatre, but mimic the variety theatre and the novel by containing strings of discrete moments, each with its own point, flattened out over a picaresque journey. The historical moment described in Kitsch­ – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the momentary culture clash between the twin materialist philosophies of capitalism and communism – provides fodder to explore the dialectic (embodied here in separated twins who spend their lives in the two warring blocs – half money-grubbing decadents, half over-regimented sheep). In Kitsch, classicism wars with Epic technique (songs, intertitles, direct address). Ideas are thus embodied in the silliness, for those able and willing to look beyond the veil.

 

And to quote the television pitchman: “But wait: there’s more!” For the play parodies Brecht. In plays like Happy End, St. Joan and In the Jungle of Cities Brecht had betrayed (intentionally or otherwise) an imperfect knowledge of the America he depicted (a knowledge gleaned almost entirely from Hollywood movies and popular songs). We do the same with our own sketchy, romanticized idea of Berlin. The play is written in the voice of a translator, as though from across a great distance. The fabric of the play thus describes a world where communication within and across cultures is at the very least troublesome, and at its worst, impossible. For the playwright who grapples daily with such problems of communication (spawning, for example, this essay), the theme is a highly personal one. But the Timonist in me fears that the majority of reviewers (let’s not call them critics) will receive precisely none of these elements I’ve described, having been distracted by some untied shoe or unbuttoned fly.

 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this editorial are solely those of the author. His professional associates, past and present, had no hand in its creation, and are just as annoyed as you are.