Stars of Vaudeville #115: Mrs. Patrick Campbell

The preposterous pose of superiority assumed by many a legit performer while touring vaudeville is best illustrated by the example of London stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Born Beatrice Rose Steall Tanner in 1865, she became a major star of the West End and a favorite of playwright George Bernard Shaw. Among numerous important roles, she was the original Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.

There’s important and then there’s important. In 1908 Edward Albee contacted her to see if she would perform on the Keith Circuit.

“And what is vaudeville?” she replied.

Albee humored her with a brief description.

“Will there be other people on the program with me?”

He responded in the affirmative.

“Wouldn’t it be awful to meet them?”

As discussions were proceeding, she called her Pekingese “Pinky Panky Pou” on the telephone and said “My little darling, I am making apologies for being late. I am with these horrible men in the vaudeville business.”

$2500 a week changed her tune lickety split. Nevertheless, she found still had enough self-possesion not to talk to anyone else on the bill, and to complain constantly about conditions to the management. In 1910, she arrived back in New York with a one-act play, called Expiation, which was full of murder and people screaming. If you’ve been wondering how a plain old dramatic play can exist on a bill with tap dancers and acrobats, remember plays like Expiation. “Mrs. Pat” returned to the States a couple more times with similar demonstrations of her histrionic artistry, before expiring in 1940.

o learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Trainwreck (the movie)

Life, literature and cinema form the three layers of my grapplings with Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit. I’ve become a sort of Facebook pen pal with author/comedian Jeff Nichols since he first sent me a copy of his book a few weeks back. Since then I’ve read the book a couple of times, and recently saw the movie twice. It’s the latter product that is the subject of this critique.

Written and directed by feature-freshman Tod Harrison Williams, the film does a terrific job of fashioning a focused story out of the entertaining if appropriately sprawling and rambling original. Whereas the book encompasses Nichols’ entire life from childhood on, Williams has made a romantic comedy of it, with occasional flashbacks to past escapades, rather ingeniously using AA sessions and stand-up comedy sets as the platform for the reminiscences.

The film is tight, has a great arc, and does a lot with a little. The pros and cons of an indie budget are on display here. For example, it only hit me until later that Williams had accomplished the capsizing of an expensive sport-fishing boat with only a steering wheel, a beer can and the open water in the frame. A burning mansion is never shown, but the smoldering ruins is. The one con I noticed was one night-time exterior far too brightly lit. One imagines a ticking clock, a tight shooting schedule, and a short-term permit enforcing the compromise.

The cast is top-notch, including some familiar faces such as Jonathan Ames (uncredited?) in a bit role as an AA counselor; Jeff Garlin as Nichols’ AA buddy and SRO roommate; and the extremely attractive indie queen Gretchen Mol, (veteran of several Woody Allen films and the title character in The Notorious Betty Paige) as the love interest.

It is the latter character who leads the way to Trainwreck’s principle flaw. As the film is constructed, it is unaccountable that the blonde, rich and gorgeous Mol would ever fall for the unemployed ne’er-do-well Nichols as played by Seann William Scott. Scott actually gives a very good performance; it’s just the wrong one. The partially fictionalized Nichols (like the real one) is a character who gets by on charm and humor (except among commercial fishermen). Nichols is correct in his published assessment that the proper type would have been John Belushi or Chris Farley, but any number of top contemporary comedians would have done as well. Steve Carrell, Adam Sandler, Jim Carey, Will Ferrell, either of the Wilson brothers: all of these guys would have known what to do. Undoubtedly the budget dictated the proscription of such big ticket talent, but it’s equally certain the producers might have found someone appropriate in the right price range. Scott’s performance as Stiffler in American Pie is the right pedigree, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, he plays the main character in Trainwreck as a serious, earnest young sad-sack, the guy who just wants “to do right”. Consequently, countless scenes in the film that should be played as sad and mortifying but hilarious, have skipped the hilarious. Why his parents continue to support him well into his thirties, or why the various characters keep telling him he should do stand-up, is therefore a mystery.

I suspect the decision to slant the story this way is a gesture of political correctness. Maybe the idea of laughing at a learning disabled man with attention deficit disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome, and several other conditions on top of a substance abuse problem seemed distasteful to the film-makers. But pity for such an anti-hero comes off as patronizing and a little 2-dimensional unless the character’s strengths are also on display.

All, that aside, I heartily recommend this as a date film, especially if you’re an unemployed, drunk, thirtysomething man trying to convince Miss January that you’re more redeemable than the sum total of your empties. Excuse me, I think my mother’s calling.

Subterranean (Black History Month Edition)

I’ve been getting invites to TerraNova Collective’s monthly series Subterranean for about a year now. Friday night I managed to add it to my current variety-going junket at the behest of Audrey Crabtree who was breaking in her new act “Two Hander” with partner Jonathan Kaplan. (I thought a Two Hander was a sandwich at Wendy’s). This was the act’s premier and their improvised set had more valleys than peaks, but the big round of applause they got at the end was well deserved. Crabtree, in particular, has nerves of steel, and as always she played every hand she was dealt with cool professionalism, grace and humor. I learn a trick or two every time I watch her, and this time I learned about fifty.

It turned out Crabtree and Kaplan (I almost wrote “Crabtree and Evelyn”) were the token splash of vanilla in an otherwise chocolate confection. February is Black History Month and in observance of the fact, the show’s producers booked an eclectic mix of African-American performers. The co-hosts Kibibi Dillon and Micia Mosely were a disarming duo, with an in-your-face style countervailing the interesting fact that one is a Ph.D., the other a New York City schoolteacher. Not a practiced team, their hosting bits had an ad hoc quality, but each shone independently in their separate stand-up sets. I was very excited as well to finally see Desiree Burch, whom I’ve heard about for years. She did a section of her current show 52 Man Pick-Up, one part performance art, one part cruise ship party game. Outfitted in a tight-fitting corset, the Rubenesque beauty draws from a deck of 52 playing cards, each one representing a man she has bedded – and left her wanting. The writing often approaches poetry (anger can inspire such heights) but the material is also bawdy enough for an audience expecting show biz, as this crowd certainly was. The evening was capped by a young Washington, D.C. rap group called “Hueman Prophets”. I’m not the best judge of this type of act: when told to stand up and say “Yeah!”,  I seldom stand up and say “Yeah”. More precisely, I never do. Even my mother used to call me an “old fart”. But from what I could gather, their material was a compendium of hip hop high water marks mixed with their own material. Their words were uplifting and one of them plays the conga. By the time I hit the street it occurred to me that two and a half hours had passed. I might have said too long for a show with only 3 acts (not including the hosts) but the reality is the time passed quickly. I never looked at my watch ‘til the subway.

Subterranean takes place in the D-Lounge beneath the Daryl Roth Theatre. For info on the next one, go here.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, 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 #114: The Hilton Sisters

The Hilton Sisters (no, not Paris and Nickey–NEVER them) were the ultimate sister act – they were Siamese Twins, joined at the base of the spine. Jack Benny told an anecdote about one night answering a knock on his dressing room door and receiving Daisy and Violet Hilton, whom he’d performed with on a bill many years before. “Remember us?” one of them asked. He did.

The girls were born in Brighton, England in 1908. They first worked in circuses, but the mitigating factor was that they were both too pretty and too talented to stay in a freak show. They played clarinet and saxophone and did an impression of the Duncan Sisters; that already made them too classy for a sideshow. Vaudeville manager Terry Turner realized their potential and got them a booking on the Loew’s circuit in 1925. The received top dollar for their act: $2,500 a week, a sum very few vaudeville artists were priveleged to receive. One of Bob Hope’s very first jobs was as a dancer, touring with the Hilton Sisters. The girls even had a film career, apearing in Todd Browning’s 1932 film Freaks and a 1951 film, supposedly based on their real life called Chained for Life.The 1997 musical Sideshow is loosely based on their lives.

Later in life they apparently worked at a supermarket for many years. One images that, working as a team, they were very efficient at bagging.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Steve Bird Redux

I hope you’ll check out this week’s Villager wherein I explore the acerbic personality of downtown writer/performer Steve Bird, whose book Hideous Exuberance I reviewed on this blog some months back.

The Vanishing City: Losing the Fun

I hope you come see me and these excellent historians at Dixon Place on February 10 as we bemoan what used to was, bewail what might have been, and be talkin’ ’bout what might could be. I’ll be the only one of the panelists speaking in that quaint rural dialect, however.

Wham Slam Bam Variety Hour

Time stood still for me last night at the Wham Slam Bam Variety Hour. Not because of any nostalgic cast to the evening (although DJ Cub does play a refreshingly eclectic mix of selections from across the decades) but because the battery in my watch died. Fortunately, as hostess Princess Sunshine was kind enough to warn me, hers is the kind of show where one can arrive twenty minutes late and still be ten minutes early. I was grateful for the caveat. Time is precious when you’re running from pillar to post; most variety hosts seem all too happy to squander it.

I am happy to report that not a minute was wasted in her economical little show in the basement at the Delancey in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. While the go-go preshow is a little too “Scores” for my taste, the Princess does get things moving once she decides to launch. Princess Sunshine (sometimes known as Juliet Jeske, I interviewed her in that guise once for Indie Theatre Now) is a deceptive one. For most of the evening she is a Texas Guinan-like hostess, foul-mouthed and apt to extemporize freely, uttering any notion that spills out of her pretty little head. Her shtick is that she is some sort of former children’s entertainer, a Krusty the Klown without a kid’s show. Ball-gowned and bewigged, she sports an accordion and plays it well, ad libbing dirty new lyrics to audience-suggested kiddie favorites, such as “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, introducing new phrases such as “heroine addict” and “shit” to the chestnut.  This is a neat vaudeville hat trick and she can milk it til the cows come home. But I said she was deceptive and I meant it. At a couple of points during the show she trotted out a couple of self penned numbers from the Princess Sunshine canon, revealing herself to be a terrific songwriter and no mean singer. Full of pain and still hilarious, these are the real jewels in the Princess’s crown, and it wouldn’t disappoint me at all to hear a whole set of them with no “special guests” to dilute the experience.

But, as a socialite once disgusted me by saying when I told her I had a day job, “You’ve got to eat” (like she knew what the hell she was talking about). I understand the concept of economic necessity all too well and so I even forgive the Princess for raffling off homemade cookies in the lead up to the intermission, and the pantywaists full of Washingtons. This is a bottom line sort of town. The tourists want their merchandise; you dole it out or you starve.  That the deceptive Princess Sunshine manages to do so (and she does so) without relinquishing something a little higher is a neat piece of sleight of hand. She probably doesn’t even know she does it herself. It begins at the top of the show when she introduces the audience to the concept of live theatre. Don’t laugh. I’ve begun to wish such a lecture were the curtain speech for EVERY show I see (or produce for that matter). The etiquette of applause and encouragement is quite foreign to modern audiences. They are accustomed to being entertained by Hal 9000. Even a girlie show in the cellar of a roadhouse deserves more respect than the yawns of retarded hipsters.

Furthermore, as the Princess reminds us, her show is a Variety hour. While burlesque comprises the bulk of the Wham Slam Bam experience,  she also presents to us an expert, plate-spinning Ringling Brothers Clown (known as The Richterscale), and a bookish Iranian-American comedienne (Negin Farsad). Both scored big. Furthermore, Jeske shows taste and discretion as a burlesque booker. From Boozy Collins (whose act is enlivened by a clown nose and magic tricks), to the Betty Paige-like ministrations of Hazel Honeysuckle, to Coco La Pearl’s picnic routine (climaxed by the fellating of a banana), Sunshine guarantees a little value-added to each segment of the show. By the time we reach the curtain closer, in which an apparently gay middle-aged man proves himself to be a lusty, topless female (BooBess the Baroness), thus scaring off her underage pick-up (played by one Sticky Ricky), we are still amused, but ready to move on. And luckily it’s time to do so.

The Wham Bam Variety Hour is one of four monthly burlesque shows happening Tuesdays at The Delancey, 168 Delancey Street. For more info, go here.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Bindlestiff Open Variety, Take Two

I went back to the Bindlestiff Open Variety Night at Galapagos last night for a little look-see.  Magic Brian was back, this time in an alternate guise as something called “the Heavy Metal Magician” — more comedy than magic, a sort of Spinal Tap with some joke shop gags mixed in. Returning also this month was the incomparable Zero Boy, whose soaring set was derailed by a sleeping guy in the front row (but not really. His ad libs around the offending snoozer were in many ways the funniest part of the act). An awesome surprise was the presence in the show of Jason Trachtenberg of the Trachtenberg Family Slide Show Players. He gave a fake name, of course, but that stage presence is unmistakable. He rattled off a few jokes from a memo pad, and extemporized in his adenoidal, hippie-like fashion. Oddly enough, I think it’s a plausible vaudeville persona — a sort of Woody Allen on amphetamines. “Yoga cougar” contortionist Amy Harlib also performed her interesting act. There is an old-school surreal quality to seeing someone with a half-century of summers behind her literally bending over backwards to please the audience. She’d do well to cut her patter at the end of the act, though. Silence is golden for this type of act.

The dynamo of the evening was Lorinne Lampert, who debuted her long-promised turn and knocked this correspondent’s socks off. Now I know why it took her so long. She has been working on it. I’m sorry, everybody else, this is how it’s done. A whirlwind of energy, she takes the stage in character and costume, radiates a funny persona that’s like a distilled version of her real life personality (with some Betty Hutton thrown in), sings standards like the stage veteran she is (but with more humor, personality and flair than most any musical theatre performer I’ve encountered), tap dances and plays the uke (both in turn, and then at the same time — that’s her Wow finish).  The uke revival is of course getting tiresome (except in the hands who really know how to play it). Unlike most non-playing beginners, however, when Lorinne screwed up the fingering, she made a bit out of it rather than getting flustered. In short, she’s my idea of a vaudevillian. Look for more of her onstage, because if I don’t have the good luck to present her, I intend to steal every one of her moves (except the blue teddy).  It’ll probably give me a heart attack.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, 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 #113: Benny Rubin

There are falls from grace and then there are falls from grace. Benny Rubin went from being one of vaudeville’s top comedians to playing the delivery man on The Munsters who gets really scared and runs away in fast motion. There are those who probably think that’s a step up. (Al Lewis, for example).

He was born in Boston in 1899 and educated at the Industrial School for Boys, a reform school, in Shirley, Massachusetts. He started in 1914, at Sam Cohen’s amateur night, where he knew Fred Allen. From the start, Rubin was an excellent hoofer. He broke in at the professional level in a tab show, with which he toured for a year, and then worked for several months on a show boat. He kicked around in burlesque for awhile, then went back into vaudeville as part of a team with a man named Charlie Hall.

In 1923, he debuted as a single at the Alhambra. His act consisted of comic Jewish monologues (which were to be the mainstay of his reputation for the next fifteen years), a tap dance, and a trombone solo. The Jewish routine brought him great popularity, although less so among sensitive Jews. His character was a broad (and to many, offensive) stereotype. A photo of one of his characters tells it all: greasepaint van dyke and skull cap, accentuating his prominent proboscis and too-close-together eyes. He looks several notches more heinous than Shylock. But he was popular.

By 1930, he was an M.C. at the Palace. In 1932, he formed a sort of loose team with Jack Haley co-hosting at the Palace. This and a couple of early talkies were the summit of his success. He had a difficult personality that kept getting in his way. He was fired from the 1925 Zeigfeld revue No Foolin’ for mouthing off to the boss. He blew a contract with Fox Pictures by refusing to get a nose job. Similar bad luck plagued him with his shot at a radio program for Orange Julius, which was canceled after one broadcast.

In 1938, he stopped doing his Jewish character through the influence of “pressure groups” Why did they think his material was anti-semitic? Gee, it couldn’t have been his first film The Delicatessen Kid.(1929)

After this, he sank rapidly from attempts to find him starring vehicles…to supporting parts…to bit parts. Orson Welles threw him some work in the 40s on The Mercury Theatre On the Air and gave him two lines in Citizen Kane which were cut from the final print. In the 50s he was frequently seen as a semi-regular on The Jack Benny Show, usually as an irascible help-desk employee (“I dunno!” was his catch-phrase). But he fell from even this level. (“I really dunno!”) From the starring vehicles of the 1930s, by the 50s he was accepting roles like “waiter”, “janitor”, and “first Indian”. He worked constantly and was in some terrific movies and tv shows, but always only with a  couple of lines. In between acting jobs, he worked as a jewelry salesman and a stockbroker. What a strange thought. How many other walk-ons on Dream of Jeannie had once been big stars? Did the other cast members know? How does one treat a show biz Romanov? Nevertheless, he was working. He managed to do so almost up until his death in 1986.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

What’s Happening This Month

Here’s what’s up with Trav S.D. in February!

The big event this month is a reading of my long percolating short stories at Dixon Place, February 22 at 8pm as part of their Page to Stage Series. Called Tall Tales (and Counterfeit Codices), these sui generis humor pieces can best be described as an attermpt to mix the pop Joycean sensibility of John Lennon’s In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works with the surreal erudition of S.J. Perleman.  The titular Tall Tales are further informed by the cracker barrel B.S. of 19th century trad yarn spinners like Mark Twain and Artemus Ward….whereas my Counterfeit Codices are faux hoaxes, lampooning the styles of writers like Ian Fleming, Hemingway, H.P. Lovecraft, and many others. All performed with maximum histrionics by the author. I’ll be on a double bill, moreover, with Julia Pearlstein who’ll be premiering her new work Weep Screed, which she describes in her own words in my new Indie Theatre Now podcast (more on that below). Dixon Place is at 161A Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Delancey. More info at www.dixonplace.org.

Also this month, I’ll be at….Dixon Place. What, again? Yes! It’s the only place I ever go these days! On February 10, 6:30pm also be participating in a panel organized by author David Freeland called The Vanishing City: Losing the Fun. It’s all about how time and time again, New York’s historic entertainment districts have fallen before the wrecking ball. Joining me on the dais will be Freeland, along with historians Andrew Dolkart and Cindy VandenBosch. I hope to see you there!

As I mentioned, my new podcast is up. The topic this month is all the exciting programming at Dixon Place. My guests are their principle booker Leslie Strongwater (rhymes with Bongwater), along with Slutty Puppet maestro Kate Brehm, bon vivant Johnny Cigar, and Clay McCleod Chapman and the group Venn Diagrams, who have just collaborated on a new musical about female impersonator Julian Eltinge.

Also, my February Villager/Downtown Express column is now on newstands. Check it out to get the latest on Charles Busch, Charles Mee, Reverend Billy, Richard Maxwell, Young Jean Lee, the Frigid Festival and more, more, more.

Lastly, I hope you’ll check out the short film I made with Art Wallace, stage and screen legend Deenie Nast, and the folks from Ten Directions. Poison Shirt/ Boots of the Transsexual mixes elements of Medea, with Godard, John Cassavetes, and Roger Corman acid trip films. I wrote and play the part of Claude, the hippie stud. Joining me on screen are Deenie Nast, Lynn Berg, Audrey Crabtree, Bryan Enk, marla Yost and Goddess Pearlman, with a pschedelic rock soundtrack by Art Wallace, Fred Backus and Robert Pinnock. We hope to screen this amazing freakout live sometime soon, but in the meantime, part one is here, part two is here.

Lastly, readership of Travalanche has doubled and then quadrupled in recent months. These wise, discriminating people know where to go for forceful, literate, comical (and honest-to-a-fault) theatre, film and book reviews, articles about famous vaudevillians, and a cornucopia of surprises delivered daily. Don’t be caught napping. Be sure to subscribe though an RSS feed to get the content shipped right to your electronic door. . Don’t miss out!

Thanks for reading through this update. I hope you have a terrific February!