Beyond the Fringe

Pete & Dud in Cleveland

(Spoiler for the Netflix series "The Crown" ahead.)

My mother stayed with us one evening before the holidays, and she set herself up to watch The Crown on Netflix. She’d gotten ahead of me, and was taking in the final episode of the recently released season two. I was trying not to pay attention, but something caught my eye.

“Is that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?” I asked. She wasn’t sure, but it was apparent to me that it was, two men in suits with skinny ties, one noticeably taller - or, the other significantly shorter, anyway - performing a sketch on a stage in a theater. The short one had on a woman’s hat and was clutching a handbag. It was obviously a comedy sketch.

Anyway, I tried not to pay attention, I would get this episode eventually. I was doing housework and trying to shut down the house for the evening. But then I saw four men, and it was obvious what I was looking at, because the other two were dead ringers for Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. I was looking at a recreation of Beyond the Fringe (circa 1963.)

Most Americans are familiar with the absurdist satire of Monty Python, and I would suggest its international success was based on its platform - television, and later film. It had wider reach and longevity. However, that team has roots in the same university cabaret traditions which were the basis for earlier comedy teams which made their fame in Great Britain through stage and radio, including Beyond the Fringe, Flanders and Swann, and one the most inspirational comedy troupes of the century, The Goons.

Patrick Warner (center) as Peter Cook in "The Crown"

In Cleveland, my family were exposed to a great deal of their work on WCLV “Saturday Night” (now Weekend Radio) a weekly show where program director Robert Conrad let his hair down to play comedy and satire from both sides of the Atlantic. Staying up late, listening to this show, hearing selections from not only the aforementioned British troupes but also everything from Nichols & May to the National Lampoon, I received a tremendous education in wit and satire before I had even reached adolescence.

Even so, I was a bit young to attend the 1975 American tour of “Good Evening” starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (post-Fringe) which played the Hanna Theatre the week of May 19th -- which also happens to be my brother Henrik’s birthday. My father took him to an evening performance, but brought the three of us to the stage door following a matinee performance to see if we could score some autographs.

Moore did not make an appearance at the stage door, but Cook did, and he was a tall man -- taller than my father at 6’2”. I was not yet seven years old, and I remember the look of complete incredulity on his face as he leaned over to take and sign my little autograph book. What bizarre American would bring a small child to this somewhat cerebral and somewhat filthy comedy revue?

Anyway. In the episode of The Crown in question (S02E10 "Mystery Man") Prime Minister Macmillan is goaded into attending a performance of that West End smash, Beyond the Fringe, by his surprisingly cruel spouse. The company generated a great deal of attention satirizing modern politics and even the royals, in a time when it was still technically illegal to do so (see: The Licensing Act of 1737.)

In case you didn't know who Peter Cook was.

Macmillan's wife intimates that he is set up for harmless ribbing. However, when he attends, the PM is not only humiliated, but in a surreal moment, the gigantic Peter Cook (Patrick Warner) actually notices him in the house, breaking the fourth wall, leaning into the house, and drawing the entire audience's attention on him for ridicule.

Prime Minister Macmillan promptly resigns.

Last year I wrote a meandering piece inspired by an episode of Mad Men in which Don and Megan attend a performance of America Hurrah!  As with that event, I am almost touched by the loving artistic detail paid to recreating a moment in theatrical history. Even more so, by the defiant protestation from the creators of television programs that live stage performance once did and could still affect the course of history.

Happy New Year!

The Great Globe Itself: Choreography

Rehearsals for The Great Globe Itself began in earnest last Wednesday. For three nights we met in our rehearsal room, and sat and read and talked. Actually, they did a lot of reading, and I did a lot of talking. But we all sat, looking at books and pictures, sharing stories and tackling several interesting English dialects – OP, Midwestern American, and a few modern of British.

Chuck, our dialect coach, worked one-on-one with each guy while the rest of us kept reading and studying. I threw so much stuff into this script, I have been anxious about how it would be handled by the actors, any actors. By the end of Friday night I was pretty confident that things were on track.

It’s weird, for several years now rehearsals for the outreach tour began in mid-January, with performances commencing the second full week of February. For years we have had a performance on Valentine’s Day -- we auspiciously opened Double Heart on Valentine’s Day itself. Yet we had yesterday off. If we had our traditional schedule, today we would have held our first Sunday afternoon show for an audience braving temperatures below 0° to attend this hot show. I am very glad we pushed the production back a few weeks this year.

Friday evening we took a little field trip … downstairs. I took our gentlemen into the only theater in Northeast Ohio that approximates the conditions of performance present in the Globe Theatre: the Hanna. Safety regulations prohibited our men from standing or working on the thrust stage, but they did have the chance to stand in the house and gaze up into the galleries, and to take in the stage as an Elizabethan audience member might, from all sides, from in the historic boxes.

Tonight, choreography! I have such vivid, happy memories of the dances Carli created for Double Heart. Critics in New York commented upon James’s and Emily’s dance together … sure, I wrote some good lines, but the dancing was how audiences believed they had fallen in love.

The men in Globe, they are not dancing to fall in love. They have work to do, their characters have work to do. Their characters are actors, preparing for a performance, and warming up. That is one of the pieces.

The other piece Carli has prepared is inspired by the curtain call dance, or “jig” which would have been expected from Shakespeare’s audience. If his text is to be believed (or rather, if you are to expect the opinions of certain of the Bard’s characters to be his own opinions) then Shakespeare hated concluding his performances with dancing. But what are you gonna do? The groundlings expect a jig and by gar, we're gonna give them one.

The Great Globe Itself: Creating Vertical Space

"Inner Below" humor.

In the six months since Bill Condee and I last shared tea, I composed the first draft of The Great Globe Itself, the play which inspired me to contact him. During that same time, he traveled to Malaysia on a Fulbright to teach, lecture and conduct research on Malaysia shadow puppetry.

When I reached out to him yesterday, informing him that I was spending a brief 36-hour period in Athens and did he have time to chat, he promised to quickly read the script I had sent several weeks earlier in preparation for our meeting. In that way, it was much like my preparing for his theater history class my sophomore year.

Much of his guidance is of a piece with one of my concerns about the production in general, which is making sure the audience, any audience, comprehends where we are and what is happening.

A few days ago the design team met to have our first production meeting, to discuss the set and costumes and overall concept. One of the questions is how we can make a single set (all three scenes take place at one of three "Globe Theatres") reflect three different time periods.

One of our interns has been tasked with dramaturgical study, and will be producing essays to be included in the program, which will act more like a study guide, to be sent in advance to libraries and schools in preparation for the production.

Finally, we will engage a dialect coach, so that characters from each time period have a distinct, regional accent.

So, Dr. Condee. We meet again.

However, I am aware it all come back to the text. In our meeting, the good Doctor suggested there are not enough "sign posts" of what is to come, and clearly laying out time, place, and facts.

This has been a major concern of mine, as I have been writing this piece for an audience who knows little to nothing about Shakespeare and his time, rather than for an insidery piece, full of private jokes for literary-minded people. Every line in Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is hilarious - if you have the entire first folio memorized.

As our conversation continued, even he suggested some very funny bits of business that involve the discrediting of John Cranford Adam's theory of the original Globe having included a small, intimate stage in the rear of the space, for intimate scenes. This area (now referred to as the "tiring house") would feature the worst sight lines and acoustics, and render the play unwatchable to those who had paid the most pennies to see the production!

But I would have to explain all that, as I just have, in order to mock it.

However, these things are relevant and important to "getting" the first scene:

• Who are these men? Burbage is clearly important historically, but he's more important that described here. The man who originated the roles of Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth? These things are not obvious.
• John Fletcher, his significance is also not emphasized enough.
• What makes it exciting for audiences to enter and experience a play at the Globe Theatre?

For that last question, we turned to my wife Toni who was joining us.  She has often expressed her great love of the Re-imagined Hanna Theatre™ as the most beautiful theater space in Cleveland, and  using the Hanna as a model of experience has been helpful to creating this work. In the play I describe what it is like to play on the stage of such a space. However, what is not coming through is what it feels like to be in the audience.

Actually, I have tried to do that, with the character of the tour guide in 2005 at Shakespeare's Globe, but perhaps that is too far along in the proceedings.

Following the first reading, one of those in attendance expressed their view that the play successfully portrays the Globe as its own character. When I asked this question, "Is the Globe a character?" Condee disagreed. Not to him, not enough, and this opinion is important to me because he is the theater space guy.

The theory is that players would drag their cart into a courtyard and thereby have not only listeners on the ground before them, but also makeshift galleries, provided by those hanging out on the balconies rising several floors into the sky. This, presumably, was the model for not only the Globe but also Blackfriars.

Hanna Theatre, Cleveland

This creates vertical space to be filled by the performer. Condee rose to his feet in the coffee house (to the amusement of those in proximity) to enact a grand vertical gesture, his open, out-stretched palm rising from right in front of him, to over his head, his gaze following his hand.

Intimate, introspective gestures will not do. You cannot bend over and emote into your hands, the acoustics and sightlines in the original Globe were simply too poor, it was a necessity to draw your audience to you.

My wife's question, then, was how to present this in the numerous spaces to which this production will travel. Each of them is flat, they are horizontal spaces, with audiences at the same level or below, as in a traditional proscenium. Should the players - the characters - in the place, convey the struggle to connect.

Each new question threatens to turn the piece into a dialectic, a play about space, which could be exciting, I guess. Returning to the motivation of the players themselves, Condee returned to the subject of signposts, and whether it were possible to foreshadow future events.

At first, I was leery of portraying people, in the moment, realizing their destiny, as that would be too odd, people don't do that. Each of the days represented are ordinary days which are a catalyst for future opportunity. Do the players comprehend in the moment the magnitude of their own future significance?

I guess I am really only referring to Wanamaker here. He's only a young adult in his featured scene, and nowhere near the point in his life where he has germinated his legacy. However, there is someone else in the scene who has the potential do it for him.

To be continued.

Double Heart: Love → Building on Fire

Big day for fires in downtown Cleveland today. First at the West Side Market, then this afternoon in the basement of the Hanna Building. I didn't see it, I was bent over my desk all afternoon constructing a budget. But that was the news, and the place evacuated late enough that this evening's rehearsal was relocated to the GLT board room.

You can rehearse anywhere, really.

There are some truly beautiful, rude and romantic moments being created here. There's a wordy, clever package which includes as many classroom-appropriate allusions to sexual contact as I could muster. Soon after, gears switch, there's play and tenderness and honesty. The boys will howl, the girls will swoon. Or so I dearly hope.

Staging Success: The PlayhouseSquare Story

 What I am truly thankful for.

One week ago, Thursday, November 15, WVIZ ideastream aired a one-hour documentary chronicling the history of theaters built during the 1920s on the north side of Euclid Avenue. Today the district is known as PlayhouseSquare, but in the intervening time Cleveland went through its steep decline from sixth largest city in America to where we are today ... which is where, exactly, I don't know. But it's not the late 1960s, when these opulent play houses were in terrible disrepair and on the verge of being torn down to -- literally -- put up a parking lot.

Throughout this blog I have told short stories about Cleveland in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s ... research for me, but also my own education of this saggy metropolis into whose orbit I was born, and where I continue to live and thrive today. Understanding where we are and where we are going requires a knowledge of where we have been, otherwise nothing makes any sense. It's also pretty interesting stuff.

Got an hour? Watch the video. There are moments I actually cried. I miss the past I never experienced, but I more thankful to be where we are today.

Assessment

Today was truly the longest day of the longest month. Rehearsals for the Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program are in full-swing. Expansive hours in a vacant office in the Hanna Building (not the site of Edith’s studio - she was in a penthouse on the top floor) training four new actor-teachers how to illuminate the classics for a potential 16,000 students in Northeast Ohio during this school year.

Last night it was Curriculum Night at Noble Elementary, attended now by not only my daughter but my son. My wife and I are members of the PTA. Please Vote Yes On Issue 6. Heights schools depend on it.

There is a great deal of theater in my future. Sunday we will be present for a matinee of The Life of Galileo at the Allen Theatre, the new home of Cleveland Play House. Next week in the Hanna Theatre, Cabaret opens Great Lakes 50th Season, and The Taming of the Shrew opens the following week.

Before the first half of 2012 comes to a close, I will have been playwright, actor and director for three different shows at three different companies.

Meanwhile, I am still attemtping to conduct my exploration of Cleveland during different points in history. Recently I have been looking into the fifties … however, with the impending staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here, we will be dipping back into the year 1936 … as if that weren’t already apparent.

Last year, during the first weekend of September, I took a 24-hour writer’s holiday with the intention of completeing an entire play. I wrote one act, which while shy of my goal was not something I was unproud of.

… what a dizzying array of double-negatives, now where wasn’t I ?

It is my intention to jump back onto that train very soon, hopefully in the form of another retreat at my parents home in Lakewood. Having had a year to meditate on the second act, purgation is definitely in order. But not this weekend. Or the next. Nor the one after that.

Let’s say October. New play in October. Someone hold me to that.

Allen Theatre

Euclid Avenue, 1927

The Allen Theatre opened its doors on April 1, 1921, just four days after the Hanna, rounding out the five primary theaters of what was soon after referred to as Playhouse Square.

This 2,500 seat house, named for Canadian-born owners Jay and Jules Allen, was constructed to be exclusively a movie palace. It was long and narrow, with a vast, deep balcony, and absolutely no stage or backstage space. The original capacity was for an audience of 3,000.

"With the house lights on, the ceiling suggested a cloudy blue sky; when the lights dimmed, twinkling stars appeared. In place of boxes, six side windows were softly lit from behind to suggest twilight outside." - John Vacha, Showtime In Cleveland

When the city was deteriorating, the Allen was the first Playhouse Square theater to close, in March 1968. The Ohio, State and Palace followed soon after. When these other Euclid Avenue theaters were saved and restored during the 1970s and 80s, the Allen's fate was still unclear. In the 1990s a new developer wanted to make it a parking lot.

Yes. Really. Still, even in the 1990s, there was talk of taking down buildings to create that all so unavailable parking in downtown Cleveland. In any event, it didn't happen, cabaret shows kept the place occupied for a time, before an actual theater space (stage, backstage, fly system, &c.) was created in 1998 for the musical Jolson. Or The Lion King, if you believe the woman who led my tour the other day. The Allen played home to the Cleveland Orchestra during is 1999-2000 season, while Severance Hall was being renovated.

Lady said "Lion King."

Unfortunately, the auditorium of the Allen was never truly reconfigured for live performance. The balcony ran almost half the length of the hall, making seats beneath it feel cave-like and a bit dreary. For a hall built in the 1920s, it was remarkably well-suited for rock music, and a popular concert venue. One of the few times I have ever attended a performance there it was a few years ago when Josh and I went to see The Musical Box, a Genesis cover band recreate the 1975 Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour.

Slipperman.

This weekend, the Allen takes on new life as the home of Cleveland Play House. Abandoning the home they now refer to unceremoniously as simply the 8500 Space, the Play House is taking a bold new step, joining forces with Playhouse Square and becoming part of a downtown Cleveland landscape which, in spite of any apparent or rational economic explanation, continues to grow.

Of course, Clevelanders are notorious sticks-in-the-mud. We despise change. And CPH Artistic Director Michael Bloom has had to deal with two issues on that front; selling a move into the heart of darkest downtown to subscribers who haven't been there since Stokes was elected, and also adapting a space with its own rich history and beauty.

Allen, before redesign.

How the successfully the first challenge is addressed remains to be seen. As for the Allen, the project director of the design firm was quoted in Cleveland Scene:

"We always wanted to maintain a visual link to the historic walls of the original structure, and that is the most unique aspect of the new Allen Theatre, where we are inserting a modern aesthetic while preserving many of the traditional details and elements."

So how do you take a 2,500+ house, reduce capacity to a fifth that size, and preserve the original design elements?

First, you paint it orange.

To be continued ...

Sources:
Showtime In Cleveland
cleveland.com
Cleveland Scene

Tom Lehrer

(I'm back. Subject matter may stray from Cleveland, because I am trying to get into the funny. So here we goes.)

Thomas Andrew "Tom" Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is America's greatest living satirist. In the 1950s he sang and performed songs for the piano which were entirely inappropriate in mixed company, without using a single smutty word. He spoke truth to power, decimating hypocrisy wherever it lay, which he found everywhere. He also taught me the difference between long and short vowels:




Tom Lehrer is not to be confused with Mark Russell, who has never been controversial, nor funny.

In 1954 Isaac Asimov claimed to have visited a nightclub in Boston where he caught Lehrer's act. It was worth recording in his autobiography that one of the songs performed was I Got It From Agnes, a sprightly little number about VD.

"I haven't gone to nightclubs often, but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time." - Isaac Asimov

In 1953 he had self-produced his first LP, Songs by Tom Lehrer which absolutely no radio station would play. He sold them himself for $3 each, at Harvard (where he graduated magna cum laude with an AB in mathematics, later his MA) and in the Boston area, but word spread across the country, and he even gained a great deal of popularity in the UK.

The compositions on this album (which he recorded in one hour) include the songs I Wanna Go Back To Dixie, My Home Town, and I Hold Your Hand In Mine, which respectively cover issues of racism, pedophilia and necrophilia, as well as Be Prepared which helpfully instructs young Boy Scouts to pack condoms ... though of course he never comes right out and says that. Most of these songs were recorded for his live album Revisited in 1960.

Reviews!

"Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste." - The New York Times

"More desperate than amusing." - New York Herald Tribune

"He plays the piano acceptably." - The Oakland Tribune

Later works became appreciably darker, stretching from simple grotesquery to a fixation on the nuclear arms race -- see: So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III), Who's Next and We Will All Go Together When We Go.. With copies of his work lying around my house growing up, Mr. Lehrer is yet another contributor to my generally cheery disposition.

Like all funny people, Tom Lehrer was born and raised in Manhattan, and he's Jewish.

Is there a Cleveland Connection? Sure.

Tom Lehrer played Korman's Back Room in 1957, and on April 4, 1959 at The Hanna Theatre, where rumor has it the cover photo from his album An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer was taken.

So there you go.

Hanna Theatre, 1959

UPDATE: Tom Lehrer (age 92) has released his lyrics into the public domain!

Tobacco Road

People loved to hate this play about Georgia sharecroppers.

‘White Trash’ On View Again In Hanna Play 

Turnip-Eating Jeeter Lester and His Forlorn Family Are Still Living by ‘Tobacco Road’ by Charles Schneider, The Cleveland Press 

"As truth - either highly localized or universal - I don’t consider ‘Tobacco Road’ worth it’s weight in last winter’s turnips. But as a theatrical sensation, it is just the stuff."

Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote: "The theatre has never sheltered a fouler or more degenerate parcel of folks than the hardscrabble family of Lester. Plays as clumsy and rudderless as 'Tobacco Road' seldom include so many scattered items that leave such a vivid impression." 

Though this play adaptation of the novel by Erskine Caldwell was banned in cities such as Chicago and Detroit, touring productions found a comfortable home in Cleveland several times over.

Romeo and Juliet (1934)

Katherine Cornell & Basil Rathbone

For the record …
Plain Dealer critic William F. McDermott had been single since he and his first wife divorced in 1921. He remarried in 1938.

It was Katharine Cornell who famously staged a performance at McDermott’s apartment in Bratenahl in 1950 when he was ill and couldn’t make it downtown for the production.

William McDermott really, really liked Katharine Cornell’s work.

In 1934 Miss Cornell brought her production of Romeo and Juliet to the Hanna (she was the producer as well as star) where McDermott was bowled over not only by her work, but by that of the entire company, including the “minor roles”.

“I do not remember a single representation that seemed as sponstaneous and vital and enriching as this one at the Hanna last evening.”
- McDermott, The Plain Dealer, Dec. 11, 1934

He really, really liked the production.

I have edited the previous entry several times, but now I have it from the source: Orson Welles was playing Tybalt by the time the show came to Cleveland, which was one of its final dates before making the transfer to Broadway. Mercutio was performed here by Brian Aherne. Welles is praised by McDermott for his “fiery villainousness.”

Hanna Theatre

Built in 1921, the Hanna Theatre was a 1,421-seat proscenium-style Broadway touring house. The Hanna stands out from the other four major theaters (Ohio, State, Palace and Allen) that make up what is now known as Playhouse Square in a few distinct ways. 

Most obviously, the Hanna is located on East 14th Street and not Euclid as the others are. Additionally, the Hanna has a short lobby, like a Broadway house. The grand, palatial houses of Euclid Avenue had large, opulent lobbies. But from the street you could have a sold-out house and no one would know. 

Owner Carl Hanna wanted the audience to spill out onto the street, to generate public excitement for whatever was happening inside. These days, certain audience members do spill out onto the street, to smoke. 

In 1936, you could have seen taken in performances of:

• Tobacco Road ('White Trash' On View Again in Hanna Play - Cleveland Press)
• Katharine Cornell in Saint Joan
• Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! produced by the Group Theatre ("The most important play the Hanna has had this year." - W.Ward Marsh, PD)
• Burgess Meredith in both the world premiere of Maxwell Anderson's High Tor (opened Dec. 30) and earlier that year in Anderson's Winterset opposite Peggy Ashcroft.
• George M. Cohan in Dear Old Darling
• José Ferrer in Boy Meets Girl

And for the record, in late 1934, Orson Welles played the Hanna in a touring production of Romeo & Juliet, starring Katherine Cornell as Juliet and Basil Rathbone as Romeo. During the course of the tour Welles played Mercutio. Once it transferred to Broadway in December 1934, Welles assumed the role of Tybalt. 

The Hanna is now home to Great Lakes Theater. 

UPDATE: Happy 100th Birthday, Hanna Theatre!

Sources: Wikipedia 

From Broadway to Cleveland: A History of the Hanna (John Vacha) 

basilrathbone.net

Little Orphan Annie

My earliest experience with Little Orphan Annie was the 1977 Broadway musical. I saw a touring production (at the Hanna?) in the late 70s, a copy of the soundtrack shortly followed. The second time the tour came through I saw it then, too - I asked to. I am not saying this as an excuse, but I was only ten or eleven years old at the time.

>When the movie came out in 1982, like most people, I despised it. As a fourteen year-old this should not have been a surprise, finding something I liked as a kid to be cutsey and obnoxious, though I had developed an air for British actors and so convinced myself I was there only to see Albert Finney (because I was rakish and classy) and Tim Curry (because I was underground cool.)

What I knew I disliked at the time was how long it was, how boring it was, and how they changed the ending so much. Well. A couple years ago when we found ourselves with an evening in New York City and two very small, tired children on our hands (it was Easter evening, we had been parading all day) my wife slipped out to pick up something, anything at Border’s, and brought back that for the kids to watch on her computer DVD player.

If she had asked, I would have let her know about the 1999 for-TV version Disney made which is by all accounts superior. But today I learned something new about the original comic strip I did not know which throws a few things into perspective.

The 1982 version is the "Reagan" version, because it de-emphasizes the poverty, the Depression (like the Disney version, they cut the Hooverville song, which makes sense as it is the only song that is sung by an ensemble, and not by any of the main characters) and basically gives Warbucks’ grotesque wealth nothing to stand in contrast to.

One obnoxious added gag involves a “Bolshevik” attempting to throw a cartoon bomb into Warbucks’ mansion. After the bomber is dispatched (we won’t get into Punjab, who was at least an actual character in the strip, if not the musical) Annie asks Miss Grace why anyone would hate Mr. Warbucks.

Miss Grace sighs condescendingly and says, “He's living proof that the American system really works and the Bolsheviks don't want anyone to know about that.”

More glaring to me than that, when placed side-by-side with the Disney version, is how much the 1982 film wants to ignore New York City. You can’t even tell that’s where it’s set, it looks like California. When Warbucks decides to take Annie on the town, instead of singing a lovesong to “NYC” they sing an extended and wearying song (found only in this film) about how great the movies are, and he rents out Radio City for them to watch (get this) Camille.

And then (get this) we get to see a condensed, but not condensed enough, edit of Camille! Alone. In Radio City Musical Hall, all alone. An example of wealth and influence, but it looks cold to me.

The Disney version features Victor Garber singing (because Albert Finney really can’t) NYC and we get the whole thing. I mean, I get it, Disney bought Times Square and has been pushing the place ever since, but this is a pretty classy way to do it. And the 1999 version is a lot more sincere, less sloppy. The girl playing Annie is charming in her ordinariness, not obnoxiously optimistic like the freakishly freckled kid in the 1982 film.

And then there’s the matter of FDR, who is a honest-to-goodness superhero in the musical, as you know, he was in real life. In 1982 we do the FDR thing (including a hideous Eleanor impersonator who appears in no other version) but makes it clear he’s not relevant and we don’t see him again. In 1999 he’s front and center, the New Deal is the savior of the nation - and he even appears at the end, like Eliot Ness, with his G-Men blocking the door so the crooks can’t escape!

Now. The irony. Let us go over a brief history of Little Orphan Annie, the comic strip.

Created in 1924 by Harold Gray (following a number of “Little Orphan” variants by Gray and other cartoonists, ragamuffins with names like Little Orphan Otto and Little Orphan Rooney) creates an orphan girl with a doll named Emily Marie for a companion who escapes from the orphanage and survives in the street by sheer pluckiness.

A year later she meets Mr. - and Mrs. - Warbucks. Warbucks takes a shine to the little girl, and almost immediately urges her to call him “Daddy.” Mrs. Warbucks is a snoot who does not like the little girl, which eventually leads to Annie running away. Mrs. Warbucks eventually sees her selfish ways, apologizes … and then disappears from the strip, never to be mentioned again, as if she never existed.

Warbucks is the perfect picture of well-functioning capitalism. He despises snobs, treats his employees well and they all apparently adore him. It is this kind of world that Harold Gray approved of - one where those who were less fortunate would get ahead if they only applied themselves, and could one day be rich beyond their wildest dreams and perpetuate the cycle of endless prosperity.

He also approves of vigilantism and people getting what they deserve. As many storylines required getting in and out of scrapes with shady characters, Warbucks (and soon enough, Annie, too) would prefer to let criminals suffer any kind of grisly fate or terribly violent death than turn them over to the authorities.

Gray also made it clear through the comic that he despised the New Deal, FDR in particular, and the rise of the labor movement.

The 1977 Broadway musical, coming as it did during a bleak period in American history, was written to intentionally draw parallels between that time and the Depression, but to also offer optimism, and in the 30s a great deal of optimism arose from the promise of a “New Deal for Christmas.” Harold Gray luckily had passed away in 1968, or 9 short years later he surely would have heard that song and shot himself.

In 1936 the radio serial of Little Orphan Annie would broadcast a 15-minute episode on the Blue Network six days a week at 5:45 PM. It was the first children’s radio serial and wildly popular. The program was sponsored by … oh come on, you know who the sponsor was.

Mulatto (play)

The New York Evening Post - November 11, 1935

Item: Langston Hughes, the short, smiling, eyebrow-mustached brown man who wrote MULATTO, a play which is right up there fighting with TOBACCO ROAD for the higher percentage of shock content, places the thoughts of this play back ten years and a thousand miles up the Niger River to Africa.

Hughes was working on a boat that stopped at a little town called Burutu. A mulatto there, the son of a native woman and an English banker who had returned to England, often came to the boat to talk to the dailors. No one else in town would have much to do with him, neither the black natives in their huts nor the pale Europeans in the English compound. Hughes went away and ever saw him again, though often wondering what had become of him.

The tragedy of the person of mixed race stayed in his mind more vividly after that experience and some years later he wrote it, though in a different land and with different characters.

...

The New York Times - October 25, 1935
Race Problems in the South the Theme of MULATTO, a ‘New Drama’ by Langston Hughes
By Brooks Atkinson

After a season dedicated chiefly to trash it is a sobering sensation to sit in the presence of a playwright who is trying his best to tell what he has on his mind.

...

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle - October 25, 1935
MULATTO: A Play by a Negro Poet about the Tragedy of Being Colored in the South Comes to the Vanderbilt Theatre
By Arthur Pollock

A good deal of warmth of feeling and sincerity has gone into the writing of “Mulatto,” the play that came to the Vanderbilt Theatre last night, but Langston Hughes is not adept in getting his ideas into shape for the theater and as a result the play is frail. MULATTO cannot expect to get much attention from the public, a fact which will no doubt not surprise the author.

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The New York Daily Herald - May 9, 1936

Item: MULATTO the Martin Jones production of Langston Huges drama, will close tongiht at the Vanderbilt Theater and re-open Monday at the Ambassador, where the producer expects to continue it through the summer.

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The Cleveland Press - Friday, October 16
Hughes Entertains Cast of MULATTO

Item: Langston Hughes, Cleveland poet, novelist and now a playwright, may not attend his first nights but he has no objections to throwing a party for the people who speak and act out the lines he has written.

Last night Hughes took the cast of his play “Mulatto” now at the Hanna, on a midnight junket into the local Harlem. The party included all the performers and such Harlemites as were attracted by the smell of grease paint and tagged along to join the fun.

The Aliens (2010)

Annie Baker made my afternoon.

I hate plays. I hate them. I never liked plays. When I was a kid my parents would take me to the Play House, or Lakewood Little Theatre or Huntington or a touring show at the Hanna or something. I liked musicals, but I hated plays without songs. They were usually boring or at least entirely over my head. Even the comedies, because they were all written in the 1930s or supposed to take place in the 1930s and so I just didn’t get them at all.

I liked Jesus Christ Superstar and Annie and The Music Man. When my dad took me to the Palace to see Cats was the first time I ever saw a musical and thought, “Wait a minute, this show sucks. Is there something wrong with me?”

My junior year in high school our drama director chose a drama, not a comedy for the fall play. For some reason he cast me - instead of a senior. Seniors were always leads in the plays. There were a lot of pissed seniors that year. And I got a swelled head because it was a drama, and I was the lead (well, the male lead, the show is actually about the woman and her journey but screw that) and I got to learn how to appreciate a story that is told onstage and not only for laughs.


Because, and here’s the thing about plays, you have to repeat them. Over and over again. And it is the novelty of people saying the same words, live, night after night, that makes a play different from a movie, right? Not only the “just this one way, just this one time, just for you” aspect which makes it rewarding for the audience, but the we-will-recreate-one-moment-time AGAIN aspect of performance.

This makes sense when you are performing Oedipus. Or Hamlet. Or even Death of a Salesman (yes, I said it) because these are moments in time that are larger than life. THIS moment is the ONLY moment. And that is why it is important, and worthwhile.

But Bogosian’s Suburbia? No, I’m not getting that. This Is Our Youth? Hells, no. These are movie scripts. Do I say that because they are contemporary? Because the characters are uninteresting? Because nothing really happens, or at least, nothing of consequence? Not sure. But I can say that if a play has one set, which is the back of a business establishment, if there is a dumpster involved, I can pretty much assume I am going to check out over all the slacker-hipster-sarcastical-ironical that is about the hit me like a stiff, hot, dumpstery smell.

But I got my American Theater in the mail yesterday and if I have made one New Year’s resolution that I have not kept, it is that I will read every new play that appears in American Theater magazine. Somebody smoked a pack of cigarettes so I could resume my TCG membership and I really owe it to them.

So there’s Annie Baker on the cover and I’m thinking, “What’s Kate Nash doing on the cover of American Theater magazine?” No, I’m not thinking that, I’m thinking oh fuck that has to be this month’s playwright and she’s not Asian or my age or anything, I am going to hate this.

And then I see it has three guys in it and in the garbage area out back of a coffee house in Vermont and I’m thinking I am in for such pain.

Because, really, what is going to HAPPEN? THERE?

No, I am not going to say anything about what happens there in Ms. Baker's new play The Aliens. But something happens. And experiencing it on the page, I laughed - out loud, here on Coventry - and I cared, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Even though it mostly amounted to chatter, reading, some singing, tea-drinking, a lot of smoking and a few fireworks of the literal, someone-was-blowing-off-fireworks kind. Only not right there, off in the distance, because it was the Fourth.

Here’s a spoiler - no one gets beaten up. No one gets raped, with a screwdriver or anything else. People aren’t mean to each other. (The dumpster gets turned over - that part rocks.) But the playwright creates a moment in time that I would watch, and watch again. To feel that moment again, what it was like to be him. Or him. Or at least near him. To pay better attention, because maybe I missed something important the time before.

Because that is what makes a play worth doing, worth seeing, or worth writing.

And it's daunting, man. It's daunting.

William F. McDermott

William F. McDermott
(Feb. 17, 1891 - Nov. 16, 1958)

Born in Indiana, attended Butler College, McDermott came to Cleveland in 1921 to become drama critic for The Plain Dealer. In addition to writing theater reviews for the Cleveland and New York stages, and making travels to Europe to interview literary luminaries, he also wrote columns on various issues of the day.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History notes that he wrote against censorship in the 1950s, I'd like to know more about that. Much has been made of a certain doting actress restaging an entire production from the Hanna in his living room in Bratenahl when he was too ill to make it to the theater.

What McDermott and I disagree on - the value of federally funded theater. What we agree on - the brilliance of Tennessee Williams.

According to Dennis McDougal the young Louis Wasserman worked to ascend the rungs of Cleveland nightlife by plying local journalists with liquor ("buying them drinks, partying with them at the Alcazar Hotel, escorting them home") and occasionally writing their items for them when they got too loaded. The list of theater critics Wasserman claims to have ghosted for is all-inclusive, including Mr. McDermott.

Sources:
The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History