Category: Radio

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Laddie of Burlesque: David Hyde Pierce Steps Through Curtains

This one seemed strangely familiar. It felt as if I had seen and heard it all before—which is not to say that the déjà vu was an unpleasant sensation. I am referring to Curtains, the final Kander and Ebb collaboration now playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre (pictured). Time Out New York called it ”your grandmother’s musical,” which bit of sexist ageism suggests dentures rather than bite. It so happens, I’m with grandma when it comes to a grand night out. At the theatre, that is. I take in musicals to be charmed rather than provoked, to be tickled or wowed rather than indoctrinated. Give me showtunes I can recall and perhaps even attempt to hum (at Marie’s Crisis, say, the Village piano bar where we spent a few hours of merry sing-along on Tony’s night). Besides, I’ve got a mirror for warts ‘n all.

So, Curtains is really my kind of show, if only it weren’t so obviously and deliberately steeped in Broadway musical history as to evoke other and unquestionably superior ones. A backstage murder mystery, Curtains is set in the late 1950s, which is a fine excuse for pastiche, as is its show within a show construction.

Most of its songs are echoes of the period (“Show People” is something you’d expect to be belted out by Ethel Merman), even though the show being rehearsed seems to date back to the 1930s and the sentimental “I Miss the Music” recalls the to me well-nigh intolerable Andrew Lloyd Webber, especially in the earnest interpretation by the to my ears miscast-for-comedy Jason Danieley. That the show is being tinkered with as its cast is being knocked off seems an excuse for the repetition of an inferior number like “In the Same Boat.”

Curtains, of course, offers its own response to captious reviewers “What Kind of Man?”:

What kind of putz
Would squeeze your nuts like that?

Musicals aside, what the show brought to my mind was The Lady of Burlesque (1943) starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I saw earlier this year (for an itemized list of my movie diet, turn right). In that comedy-thriller, a show must go on while a killer is on the loose and an investigation underway. In the case of Curtains, though, it is not the leading lady but the detective who takes center stage and—despite the obvious handicaps of lacking a leading man’s looks or voice, not to mention a convincing Boston accent—takes it in strides at that.

I happen to have been at the Hirschfeld on the day that the show’s male lead, Tony-winning David Hyde Pierce, lifted the curtain on his private life and came out of the closet at last; on stage, he was busy turning a double life into a single one (negotiating his love for musicals with the business of solving crime), and being single into a happy double (by teaming up romantically with one of the suspects). It might be “your grandmother’s musical”; but its leading man is finally breaking with conventions that seemed out-of-date two decades ago.

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Great Match, Ill Served: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes in Deuce

Well, I had been given ample warning. About Deuce, I mean, the Terrence McNally play starring American Theater Hall of Famers Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. Reviewers and friends uniformly panned it. Not content to take their word for it, I set out to see for myself, only to confirm that Deuce truly is an insipid trifle of a play, a plotless, actionless one-acter whose greatest offense is its squandering of talent: two captivating leads let down by a leaden script and reduced to longshots by an extravagant set on the large stage of Broadway’s Music Box theater.

That set—the impersonal space of a tennis stadium filled with electronically simulated spectators (or spectres)—echoes and amplifies the hollowness of the production, but appears to have been designed (by Peter J. Davison) to give audiences certain to tire something to look at or look out for—as if Lansbury and her accomplished co-star weren’t reason enough to head out for the theater. They aren’t, if onlookers cannot zoom in on and get close to these two, as is warranted and promised by the potentially intriguing premise, the opportunity to eavesdrop on a private exchange between two celebrities dragged out of retirement and forcefully reunited for a belated tribute.

Their talk, however ably delivered, is devoid of anything amounting to revelations. They are long-ignored and finally acknowledged tennis legends who (surprise!) happen to be real women with long personal histories and strong opinions—opinions shared in lines so insipid that the playwright felt obliged to spice them up with profanities in hopes of getting spectators to stir, gasp and guffaw at expressions supposedly too vulgar to escape the mouths of our venerable elders.

You know you are faced with a dramatic dud when you open the Playbill to discover that even leading lady Lansbury struggles to give it to you in a nutshell too rotten to contain much good: “The play is about age—about becoming old and not being in the mainstream in the world of tennis today.” Who is the target audience? Martina Navratilova? Then again, it is also a “metaphor for age and the problem that women have with old age.” Like finding good parts, I suppose.

The gimmick of the play (and it is little more than that) is the juxtaposition of the real women behind the legend with the shallowness and vanity of the television sportscasters prattling overhead like a pair of false gods, a vapid chat (reminiscent of the characters created, to far better effect, by Christopher Guest in mockumentaries like Best in Show and For Your Consideration) in contrast to which the play offers next to nothing.

Deuce might be better served on radio, which is the ideal medium for intimate talk and character studies. Radio plays do not suffer from a lack of action or circular construction, from being anecdotal and fragmentary. Radio theater, which does not lose sight of its actors on enormous sets, is well suited to the conveying of an impression (a sense of dread, say) or the imparting of an idea. On the stage that sort of thing or nothingness is a deucedly bad one.

Now, I don’t care whether I’ll ever get to see another play by Mr. McNally (who’s rather more amusing, if similarly trifling Love! Valour! Compassion!, starring Nathan Lane, I saw back in 1995). I do mind, however, that this might have been my last chance to see Ms. Lansbury on the stage. As a swansong, Deuce is tantamount to Trog.

Some fifty years prior to her nonetheless Tony award nominated performance in Deuce, Lansbury played a retired stage actress on radio’s “outstanding theater of thrills,” Suspense,” in a melodrama titled “A Thing of Beauty” (29 May 1947). A woman willing to kill for a good part or to forge an alliance with someone she does not respect, she ends up having, quite literally, lost face. Now, there’s a metaphor!

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]

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Digest, Please!

Well, it’s a different kind of animal. The kind that digests in the very instance of ingestion. Webjournalism, I mean. It matters little whether or not you write for a living, as long as you write what you are living while you are living it, while you experience or witness what is being stored and storied. My digestive system operates far less efficiently, I’m afraid, which is why I frequently end up with a digest of my day-to-day.

It is not that I regurgitate the past. I very much live in the moment, a skill (or nearsightedness) I developed living the United States, the empire of “now.” And yet, by the time I manage to keep up with them, those moments have lost their momentum. They are memories the writing down of which is the reheating of yesterday’s repasts. Instead of journalizing my journey as it happens, I delay the act of relaying it by sharing recollections edited, according to a Wordsworthian scheme of spontaneity, in motionless and remote tranquility.

This is what I feel compelled to do now—catching up with myself. After all, taking bites out of the Big Apple for a month left me with plenty to digest, even if some of pieces of my intake turned out to be as unpalatable as the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening or as bland as the Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a sentimental exchange starring the ill-served if indefatigable Angela Lansbury.

Only a few days ago I spent an afternoon at Coney Island, walking past Nathan’s (not eating the hot dogs that once got me terribly sick) and riding the old Cyclone—whose twists and curves once caused me to break the bones of my best friend sitting beside me. Today, I am cleaning up after a sick dog that swallowed a bone far too large to be digested, hoping he will be spared an operation, hoping I am going to be spared something akin to “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones” (Norman Corwin’s radio play about a boy determined to retrieve his dead dog from “Curgatory”).

It is retrospection that saves me from exposing myself at my most vulnerable—in the in-between of everyday living. It is life tidied up and tied up neatly. It is loose ends woven into a security blanket. Digest, please!

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Murder in the Backroom; or, No Place for a Lady

Well, they are still at it. Slamming doors, screaming bloody murder, getting into fisticuffs—all in a perfectly orderly manner, standing upright, their eyes focused on the sheets of paper in their hands. The W-WOW! players, I mean, who meet on the first Saturday of each month, from September to June, to step into the “broadcasting” studio in the (pictured) backroom of the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in downtown Manhattan. 

Last night, for their final performance before going on summer hiatus, the W-WOW! troupe recreated episodes from Broadway Is My Beat (“Francesca Brown,” originally broadcast on 2 June 1951) and Richard Diamond, Private Detective (“The Carnival Case,” from 16 August 1950). Capably delivering their lines, the two leading men—Steven Viola as Danny Clover in Broadway Is My Beat and Michael H. Johnson as Richard Diamond—were more than amply supported by the four ladies of the fancifully titled Cranston & Spade Theatre Company. Indeed, they were upstaged by them, and that despite the fact that the titular character of the evening’s first offering was dead before the action got under way.

Sheila York brought sex appeal to the role of a carnival gypsy who beckons Diamond into “the inner sanctum,” which gives the leading man a chance to quip: “Haven’t I heard you on the radio?” As a former DJ, the woman who played her sure has experience in broadcasting. And aside from being a competent voice artist, York is also a published novelist who draws inspiration from the medium in which she worked. Her latest thriller, A Good Knife’s Work, takes readers inside the business of radio drama in the 1940s—with a female detective as a guide.

Voice-over artist and teacher Karla Hendrick has a voice most likely to succeed in that business, standing out even in parts no larger than that of a gum-chewing waitress cracking wise with the gumshoe. In charge of musical transcription and accompaniment was Heather Edwards, while DeLisa M. White handled the sound effects, delivering blows and popping balloons according to the cues in the script.

For now, the ladies of W-WOW! are adjuncts to the dramas presented by the players, deliver commercials, play sidekicks, sirens, or servants. Sure, Diamond’s girlfriend Helen knows how to handle a gun (as is demonstrated in one of the script’s sly takes on traditional gender roles); but maybe the company should take on some of the radio thrillers featured in Jack French’s Private Eyelashes and revive that rare breed of crime-solving radio heroines. So, how about it, Messrs. Cranston & Spade?

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Alexander Technique: A Matter of Queer Posture

Well, it’s been a few decades since my first (and only) toga party. Last night, I felt as if I were crashing one. A friend of mine took me to a way-off Broadway production of a play called A Kiss from Alexander (book and lyrics by Stephan de Ghelder; music by Brad Simmons). Billed as a “musical fantasy,” it is essentially a backstage stabbing farce—say, All About Abs—wrapped in romance and sentiment. Its tone is considerably less even than the spray tan on the cast’s collective hide.

Borrowing from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Down to Earth, which it references, this gay Band Wagon rolls along merrily enough, confident in attracting an audience steeped in Hollywood myth, in Broadway lore as well as lingo. “Alexander technique,” for instance, which served as a pun in the play, is a way of learning how to rid the body of tension. Alternative culture has been doing just that by leaning on traditions that produce anxieties, irreverence being the release.

Art not quite sure of its standing tends to be self-conscious. Witnessing the return of Alexander the Great in his mission to sabotage a bawdy, low-fidelity account of his private life (in a production called “Alexander Was Great!”), I was reminded of Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “A Descent of the Gods.” In it, the god of Trivia recalls how Venus, Mars, and Apollo visited Earth, and how they were embraced and degraded by the media, the least respected and most prominent of which being the one in which poet-journalist Corwin operated.

By now, the god of Trivia has been knocked off his throne by the god of Camp. And while I am not a worshipper of either, it is difficult to deny the force of the latter.

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Transatlantic Call: From Radio Reportage to Video Conferencing

Now, I am not going to get all sentimental and give you the old “tempus fugit” spiel; but I’d like to mention, in passing, that this post (the 355th entry into the journal) marks the beginning of a third year for broadcastellan. Meanwhile, I am resting with a bad back—in the city that never sleeps, of all places. This afternoon, during an inaugural transatlantic video conference with my two faithful companions back home in Wales, my mind excused itself from my heart and took off in reflections about the ways in which technology has assisted in forging a bond between the US and its close ally across the pond, and the degree to which such tele-communal forgings may come across as mere forgeries when compared to the real thing of an actual encounter.

I was reminded of this again when, a few hours after my chat, I sat, as of old, on a bench by the East River, in a park named after Carl Schurz, a fellow German gone west who likened our ideals to the stars that, however far beyond our touch, yet assist those guided by them to “reach their goal.” In my hand was a signed copy of a newly purchased biography of Edward R. Murrow (by Bob Edwards). It opens with Murrow’s report from the blitz on London, Murrow’s residence during the war.

The broadcasts from London (as featured and discussed here by Jim Widner) did much to enhance the American public’s understanding of the plight of a people, who, due to Hollywood’s portrayal of the British, seemed stuck-up, remote, and about as real as the fog in which Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce waded through some of their adventures. Reports from Britain not only brought home a Kingdom but a concept—the notion of brotherhood untainted by the nationalism whose fervor was responsible for the war.

If not as emotional as Herbert Morrison’s report from Lakehurst during the explosion of the Hindenburg, Murrow’s updates from London were delivered by a compassionate journalist who not only listened in but was a part of what he related while on location. On this day, 21 May, in 1950, British novelist Elizabeth Bowen connected wirelessly with her American audience by speaking via transcription on NBC radio’s University Theater. Bowen referred to her novel The House in Paris (1935) as “New York’s child,” the “fruit of the stimulus, the release, the excitement [she] had received here.” Would she have been able to enter into the feelings of a child lost in a strange house, she wondered, if she “had not just returned from another city, equally new and significant to me?”

There are limits to the connections achieved by the wireless, a controlled remoteness that brings home ideas without ever feeling quite like it. Rather than seeing or hearing, being there is believing. I felt far away during my transatlantic call; but I know I will know what home is now once I get back there . . .

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“Yankee Doodle went to town” . . . and That Is Where You’ll Find Him

Well, call me a “dirty rat,” but I’ve never paid much attention to this memorial on East 91 Street (or “James Cagney Place,” to be precise), a mere two blocks from where I used to live. The everyday renders much what surrounds us invisible; so, I’m going to make some noise for the old “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the tribute to whom I now see with eyes accustomed to the green hills of Wales. Say, just how Welsh is the old New Yorker? Taking advantage of the wireless network I am gleefully tapping, I reencountered the aforementioned Cagney in an adaptation of Night Must Fall by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams (previously discussed here). On American radio, the role of Danny, the charming psychopath, was most frequently played by Robert Montgomery, who also starred in the 1937 screen version. As it turns out, Cagney does not sound unlike Montgomery, which is to say, rather Irish than, as Williams prescribed it, “more Welsh than anything else.”

Among the other radio-related finds of the day were fine copies of Earle McGill’s Radio Directing (1940) and Harrison B. Summer’s Thirty-Year History of Radio Programs, 1926-1956 (1971), the latter of which I consulted so frequently while writing my doctoral study on old-time radio. Both volumes sat on the shelves of the Strand bookstore on 828 Broadway, which is well worth a visit for anyone who enjoys browsing for unusual books. A few blocks away, I found a copy of Once Upon a Time (for a mere $4.99); I have long wanted to catch up with this comedy. After all, it is based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy (“My Client, Curley” (previously discussed here).

Meanwhile, night is falling on Manhattan. Time to leave the old wireless alone and go out for a drink . . .

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I’ll Talk Manhattan

Well . . . eventually. As you may have gathered from the snapshot (in case you are among the multitude not inclined to catch up with my keepings-up), I am back in the town I called home for about fifteen years of my life, the town to which I owe more than my academic education, the town that owes me my youth but, I am glad to say, is welcome to it. It sure feels great to be back; to hear the sirens in the avenues, to smell the dusty streets, to see what’s being torn down, remodelled, or in a familiar if progressive state of disrepair. How nice it is to run into old neighbors and catch up on months of gossip, of which the apartment building in which I am staying is full, considering that another story is being added to it and its frame is suffering along with the old tenants who are being expected to put up with dirt, noise, and noticeable structural damage.

It is a treat to inhabit places I otherwise only read about or see online, in journals like Courting Destiny (of which I thought when I passed the Fairway market) or NY Nitty-Gritty. Aside from walking around town and revisiting (or hoping to revisit) places I used to frequent (the Strand bookstores, for instance, which is not far from the South Street Seaport of which I took the picture on the right; or the aforementioned Argosy) I am taking it far easier than the tourist who feels obliged to cram the metropolitan experience into a tight schedule. Sure, I got my eyes on tickets for two Broadway shows: the highly acclaimed Grey Gardens and the much-maligned Deuce (starring Angela Lansbury); but that’ll have to wait until I am good and ready for evenings at the theater.

Luxuriating in leisure, I still need time sit down and to carry on with broadcastellan, which, after all, is a journal about sitting down, closing one’s eyes, and listening to the radio. Since I am enjoying a clear wireless signal (much to the surprise of this piggy-backer), I am able to make a few additions to my old-time radio recordings library. So, I guess I am squirreling it right now, gathering food for thought to be enjoyed in the comfort and quiet of my new home across the Atlantic . . .

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Low Brow/High Horse: Radio Vs. Television, Round Three

Well, I’ve been going over the results of the “Great British TV Survey” in the latest issue of the Radio Times. Surveys tickle me, which is probably why I used to enjoy guessing the answers on Family Feud. Anyway. I think I am just giddy about Eurovision on this eve of the semi-finals, the night Europe celebrates its Hasselhoffian roots. Sure enough, the Eurovision Song Contest tops the survey in the category of “guilty pleasure.” I know no such discreditable delights. If I am lowbrowsing for Sonja Henie, I don’t hope to find Hedda Gabler on skates. And if I expose myself to the pipes of radio’s “Vagabond Lover” (Rudy Vallee, left), I don’t expect Lorne Greene (or whatever’s the name of the opera that sounds like the actor who played the guy who ran the Ponderosa). I leave my high horse in the stable when treading on the thin ice that is likely to crack once one begins to account for one’s tastes or discounts those of the masses, the pondering of which is a hobbyhorse of the elitist.

That said, I could not fill out such a questionnaire without drawing a blank. I have remained immune to the charms of Doctor Who or Coronation Street. And much as I enjoyed shows like The Avengers and The Royle Family (a sort of Vic and Sade gone Eurotrash), I simply don’t know enough about the history of British “telly” to decide whether or not the medium’s offerings have gotten better or worse over the years. Not that I rely on the informed opinions of galaxies-removed stargazer Sir Patrick Moore, who had this to say on the topic:

[British television has gotten] much worse. Any interesting programmes are put on very late. The 650th edition of The Sky at Night [which Moore hosts] was put out at 2 AM [. . .]. The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days. I would like to see two independent wavelengths—one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men.

American radio programming, back when the wireless was the main source of home entertainment, often met with similar dismissals, a disdain for the popular that dates back to the days of bearbaiting and the origins of reading for pleasure. Some fifty years ago, Fortune Magazine called for a “Revolt against Radio,” arguing that a “very large part of America’s radio fare (most soap operas, quiz programs, audience-participation shows [the kinds of programs mocked by radio comedian Fred Allen on this day, 9 May, in 1948], gag-comedy acts, juke-music sessions, commercial announcements) would affect any person of modest discrimination somewhere in the range of complete indifference and acute illness.”

I don’t know what is worse: being talked down to by broadcasters or patronized by their critics? Perhaps this is why I turned (on) to old-time radio, the everyday in retrospection. It is so little regarded these days and treated (if at all) as being very nearly beyond criticism that it can be appreciated anew by those equipped with a keen ear and an open mind. Besides, what does it matter whether the brow is high or low once your eyes are closed? When you find yourself in the country of the blind, don’t trade that kingdom for a high horse.