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!

I'm Free (Heaven Helps The Man)

Make-up for an evening of one-acts.

Late summer, 1984. It’s a Sunday night, the next morning is the first day of school. I am lying in bed, probably around 10 PM because in spite of the fact that I was sixteen years old, I had great anxiety about not getting enough sleep, and unlike most kids my age, I got up ninety minutes before school started (and it only took ten minutes for me to bike to school.)

The radio next to my bed was on. I had the radio on all night, every night, from 1977 until I went to college. I fiddled with the volume knob until it was just quiet enough so that I could hear it without having to work too hard to hear it, and not so loud that it would keep me up. First WGCL (1977-1982) then WMMS (1982-1986). Saturday nights I might fall asleep to WCLV Saturday Night, at least until high school when the odds were good that I would be up late weekends.

But it was the night before my first day of junior year, and I was listening to WMMS. Lights were out, I was resting, relaxing. The song I’m Free (Heaven Helps The Man) by Kenny Loggins came on. It starts with this low, atmospheric, bass note syncopation before busting open with a guitar riff and some higher keyboard notes and an upbeat tempo.

I suddenly sat up in bed. I mean, I gasped, and I sat up, shocked and desperate, the way you feel when it’s midnight and you remember you have a book report on something you haven’t read, or that you had forgotten someone’s birthday. But it wasn’t either of those things.

The song I’m Free is from the Footloose motion picture soundtrack. The video shows the singer breaking out of prison (he’s free!) then hooking up with Virginia Madsen, and generally being on the run. It’s about freedom.

But it wasn’t the video. I wasn’t watching the video. It have have been the refrain, which includes a chorus of young people yelling, “I’m free!”

In that moment, in a split second, in the firing of a synapse, I recalled when the first single from Footloose had been released, the title track, back at the beginning of the year. I had resisted the dance thing, but everyone was dancing, the boys as well as the girls (ever since the end of disco, it had been taboo) and then I developed a crush on this one girl and there were these dances, at school, at church, at cast parties and private parties, and teen night at Spanky’s -- she was always there, and I had to do something about that.

Goofing in a Spanish photo booth.

I asked my mom if we could go clothes shopping and she was very, very surprised because neither of my two older brothers had ever asked such a thing and we went to TJMaxx and I got a dozen outfits, it must have set her back a hundred dollars.

And a short, Reagan-era haircut.

That spring I had been to Sibs Weekend at O.U. which for reasons that should be obvious I cannot remember. After the spring musical a number of us produced an evening of one-acts, I directed my first scene.

Ghostbusters opened that June, one of the funniest movies of all time, I saw it no less than ten times in the theater that summer.

That July I spent a month in northwest Spain, learning conversational Spanish, the uses of vermouth, how to smoke horrible tobacco, defending America to skeptical natives, skinny dipping, and yes, working out in discos, every afternoon, every night.

Returning home, summer concluded with band practice, more late nights, dancing in driveways. And now the summer of 1984 was at an end, time to return to school.

In a moment the sheer scope of activity overwhelmed me. This song made me think of that song, and everything that had happened to me, and every place that I had been in between.

And I felt that terrible, sinking sensation, hearing that chorus of teenagers shouting, I’m free, that there was a whole world happening out there, and that that girl was still out there, and that I was in bed, accomplishing nothing.

WCLV Marathon for the Cleveland Orchestra

Spring, 1970 - Cleveland's classic music station, WCLV 95 FM conducted its first on-air marathon to raise money for the Cleveland Orchestra. The goal was $10,000 which they raised handily within 24 hours.

The goal for their eighth marathon (1977) was $125,000.  That seems so modest by today's standards, when the Cleveland Orchestra's 2012 operating budget is $42M. But as today, the recession hit performing arts organizations very hard, and public fund-raisers like this not only raise necessary funds, but "demonstrates the wide support of the orchestra by thousands of people who may never set foot in Severance Hall," said (then) WCLV vice president and program manager Robert Conrad.

Hitting the east side and west side, the 24-a-day weekend of events (April 22-24) were broadcast live from Severance Center and Parma Town. Conrad and Tony Bianchi interviewed a host of regional celebrities, including orchestra Director Lorin Maazel, Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Vincent Dowling, Fred Griffith and Joel Rose from Channel 5's Morning Exchange, among many others, including the legendary Mitch Miller.

Ours was a WCLV household, though I have never been a fan of classical music. However, at the age of eight I was definitely a huge fan of WCLV Saturday Night, which had been a fixture on the program schedule since it went on the air in 1962. Three-hours of high-brow comedy from 10 PM to the 1 AM sign-off. (Cue: Today Is The First Day of The Rest of Your Life.) It was due to this program, perhaps, more than any other influence that I became an anglophile. They played Flanders & Swann, bits of The Goon Show, Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe, as well as Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, National Lampoon (the clean stuff) and countless other comedians, comedy troupes, parody commercials and novelty songs.

The annual orchestra marathon included premiums for those who contributed, including CLE Orchestra swag, and tickets to Severance or Blossom, as well as contributed offers from area merchants and artists. However, if enough people kicked in a total of $20 per hour, every hour, my brothers and their friends would keep playing Monopoly in a tree.

No kidding. I wish I could claim to have been a part of it, but at the age of eight my limbs were still too short (and my nerves too weak) to climb the tree in our backyard. But I did try to contribute, fetching things like food and drinks to haul up in a bucket while they tree sat, huddled around a wooden frame set in the tree to hold the board, using cards and money which had been laminated for the occasion.

Because it was April in Bay Village. It rained. It was cold. As I recall, it sucked, but then I was listening to the radio all night, warm and dry in my bed.

WCLV now broadcasting from ideacenter in downtown Cleveland at 104.9 FM celebrates its fiftieth anniversary on November 4, 2012.

Sources:
WCLV.com
The Plain Dealer:
April 11, 1977 - Marathon: Serious Business by Raymond P. Hart
April 6, 1977 - Marathon for Orchestra has a star cast by Robert Finn