Friday Dance Party: Rue's Road

(I guess in Paris that would be Rue's Rue...?)

Rue McClanahan

1934-2010

It was just over two years ago that I wrote of Estelle Getty's death, and almost a year later, that of Bea Arthur. With McClanahan's passing, our only remaining Golden Girl is also the oldest of them all, Betty White. She's enjoying a splendid resurgence of popularity, bless her, and I hope a year or so from now, I'm not tackling this sad task yet again.

McClanahan was born in small-town Oklahoma, and was given the unwieldy birth name of Eddi-Rue, a combination of her parents' names. Her first clue to drop the first part of that name may have come shortly after high school, when she was drafted by the army, who mistook her for a man. She graduated with high honors from the University of Tulsa, with a double degree in Theatre and German (maybe she was planning a career doing Brecht?). She spent a bit of time in Los Angeles, studying at the Pasadena Playhouse, after which she headed to New York, where she launched an active stage career. She created the role of Lady Macbird in the Off-Broadway parody of LBJ's political rise called Macbird!, and made her Broadway debut playing a prostitute opposite Dustin Hoffman, a year or so before he met Mrs. Robinson, in the musical Johnny Shine.

In 1970, she was hired for a short-term gig on Another World, which she parlayed into a year-long role as a wackjob obsessed with a married man, and she won an Obie for her role in Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now? It was that performance which caught the eye of TV writer-producer Norman Lear, who remembered her several years later when casting a middle-aged couple to guest star on All in the Family. (The couple was invited to the Bunkers for dinner, who soon discover they want to swap partners for a little nookie.)

When Maude hit the airwaves, Rue appeared sporadically as divorcee and best friend Vivian Cavendar; she worked well with star Bea Arthur, and in a year or two, she was upgraded to co-starring status. Here is a nice clip from the first season of Maude, from the episode which caused all the fuss. It's about five minutes long, but worth watching to see how those types of sitcoms were presented in the early 70s. It's also fun to notice that both Arthur and McClanahan look substantially older in this clip than they did more than 10 years later in Golden Girls.

In the early 80s, Rue was invited to participate in The Golden Girls, but the star was not interested in the role she was offered, that of naive airhead Rose (in its later years, Maude had turned Rue's character of Vivian into a brainless twit, very different from the dry character in the above clip). Meanwhile, Betty White, well remembered from playing an aging sex-pot on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was approached to play the similarly provocative Blanche. The stars, and soon the producers, recognized that they should switch roles, and with the addition of Arthur and Estelle Getty, the dream cast was set.


Since this is, after all, the Friday Dance Party, here's a quick clip of just that (take a look at those gams!):

All the ladies won Emmys during the show's run, with Rue taking her turn in 1987. After attempting an ill-advised sequel to the show called The Golden Palace (it was really tacky), McClanahan returned to the stage. She was seen to good effect in the all-star revival of The Women at the Roundabout Theatre (this is not the crummy film revival of a few years ago), and was the first replacement for Carole Shelley as Madame Morrible in the long-running smash, Wicked.


Rue was the youngest of the four Golden Girls (by about a decade!), but she had her share of health trouble. She fought breast cancer in the late 90s, and in November of last year, underwent a triple-bypass. By all accounts, she was recovering well until she had a massive stroke yesterday.

I met Rue McClanahan years ago, during the height of The Golden Girls popularity. She had a friend whose daughter attended Notre Dame High School, where my friend Judy runs the theatre program, and she showed up to attend one of the performances. She was a gracious and down-to-earth lady, whom I probably embarrassed with my compliments on her work in Maude and Golden Girls.

Here is one more Dance Party clip, from the videotaped performance of Nunsense. This is clearly a woman who relished performing live.

The Mouths of Babes

Art Linkletter

1912-2010

It was in the mid-1940s, when Linkletter was in the early stages of a career which spanned 80 years, that he stumbled upon the routine for which he is best remembered. He was hosting several radio programs at the time, and as a whim, recorded a conversation he had with his young son after his first day in school. The boy was refusing to return to school the next day. Why?

"Because I can't read, I can't write, and they won't let me talk."

Linkletter played the exchange on a Sunday evening program he hosted, and received an avalanche of positive response. In 1945, interviews with children became a regular segment on his radio show House Party, and remained the most fondly remembered of all his routines. When the program transitioned to television, Art put the word out to Los Angeles school teachers that he was looking for outgoing, interesting, talkative kids who might not be intimidated by a TV studio. He wrote, "Pick the kids you'd like to have out of the classroom for a few precious hours."

Art: "What do your parents do for fun?"

Kid: "I don't know. They always lock the door."

Linkletter's early life was not an easy one. Abandoned as an infant, he was adopted by an elderly couple, and left home at the age of 16, hopping freight trains as a hobo to cross the country, looking for work. He landed in San Diego, where he snagged his first job in radio while attending the college which would become San Diego State. His easygoing style and likable nature made him a natural for radio and the early decades of television.

Art: "What does your mommy do?"

Kid: "She does a little housework, then sits around all day reading the Racing Form."

His various programs made good use of his improvisational skills, and House Party, People Are Funny, and Kids Say the Darndest Things were never scripted. They were part game show and part interview show, and often included stunts perpetrated on unsuspecting civilians; Linkletter was fond of saying he inadvertently invented Reality TV.

The suicide of his daughter in 1969 was blamed on her use of LSD, and Art became an energetic anti-drug crusader. An emotional conversation with his daughter resulted in the spoken word recording, We Love You, Call Collect, released shortly after Diane Linkletter's death; it won a Grammy.

Art: "What do you think would make a perfect husband, Karen?"
Karen: "A man that provides a lot of money, loves horses, and will let you have 22 kids and doesn't put up a fight."
Art: "And what do you think you'll be when you grow up?"
Karen: "A nun."

Throughout his life, he displayed a shrewd business sense. He was hired to host the grand opening of Disneyland in 1955, and the notorious skinflint Walt Disney refused to pay him more than union scale. In exchange for working for a pittance, Art negotiated a deal in which his business enterprise would have exclusive rights over the park's camera and film concessions for a full decade. He made a mint.

But it was surely the interviews with the children for which Art Linkletter will be best remembered. The routine was revived in 1998, with Bill Cosby hosting an updated Kids Say the Darndest Things, for which Art made contribution.

Art: "What kind of animal would you like to be?"

Kid: "An octopus. Then I could grab all the bullies at school and hit them with my testicles."

Despite much personal tragedy (he outlived three of his five children), Art Linkletter maintained a sunny disposition and optimistic, life-loving outlook. In his later years, Linkletter became an avid activist for the aged, urging the country's oldsters to make the most of their latter years. He practiced what he preached, writing several books on the subject and conducting lecture tours right up until his death last week at the age of 97.

The Bronze Venus

While I was traveling the past three or four weeks, a whole lot of people kicked the bucket. Some of them, I have no interest in writing about, but several deserve some attention, even this late in the day. I hope to catch up on everybody before the week is out. Gotta start with the biggie:

Lena Horne

1917-2010

Everybody knows this musical legend died several weeks ago, and there have been so many tributes out there, well, this will seem like old news. Horne was born into an upper-middle class family, with a mother who was an actress and a father who made some money in the gambling industry. She spent some time in the chorus at the Cotton Club before moving to L.A. to pursue a nightclub career. She was one of the first black performers to be offered a contract at MGM, a contract which was negotiated by her father, and included assurances that she would never be forced to play a domestic or a hooker. Her breakout roles came in 1943, in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Liza Minnelli has recently claimed that her father Vincent discovered Horne and brought her to Hollywood to star in Cabin in the Sky, but in fact, Lena was already in Los Angeles when talent scouts brought her to his attention, and she already had several small film roles to her credit, including one in Panama Hattie.

Horne remained in Hollywood for about a decade, making musical contributions to such films as Broadway Rhythm, Ziegfeld Follies, and Words and Music. Her appearances in those films were usually stand-alone musical numbers which could be easily removed when her films played in the deeply segregated South. She was devastated to lose the plum part of Julie in 1951's Show Boat; the production code at the time banned inter-racial relationships on film, ironic in this case, as the role was a woman of mixed race who fell in love with a white man. Ava Gardner took the role, and rehearsed the musical numbers by listening to Horne's pre-recorded renditions.


Horne and Hollywood parted company, partially due to Lena's leftist political views, which forced her onto the blacklist for a time. She continued to perform live concerts and returned to New York to costar in the Broadway musical Jamaica, for which she won a Tony nomination. Her political activism always influenced her career; she walked out of a USO concert she was giving during WWII, when she discovered that white German POWs were seated in front, while black USA soldiers were confined to the back rows of the theatre. She marched on Washington with Martin Luther King, attended a rally for the NAACP with Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers only a week before he was murdered, and was a visitor to the Kennedy White House only two days before JFK's assassination. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to outlaw lynching and, decades later, hurled a lamp at a fellow restaurant patron who was murmuring racial epithets. You gotta love this gal!

Horne announced her retirement in 1980, but it didn't stick. She returned to the spotlight the following year, sharing the stage for a single performance with Gene Kelly in a gala benefiting the Joffrey Ballet. One of the Nederlanders was present, who offered Lena a Broadway house for a month of concert performances. Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music was a smash hit, and ran for a year, winning its star a special Tony and two Grammys for the cast album. The show was videotaped for home viewing, spawned a lengthy international tour, and placed Lena Horne in the history books for giving the longest running solo performance in Broadway history (she still holds that distinction).

Horne's eventful life seems ripe for a biopic, and Janet Jackson was attached to such a project for television, until her wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl attracted such negative attention. Lena attempted to block the production, though ABC was prepared to move forward with the project without Horne's consent; it was Jackson herself who willingly withdrew from the film, once she discovered Lena was against her playing the legendary singer. A stage musical covering Horne's life, starring Leslie Uggams (below), was presented at the Pasadena Playhouse last year. The show was called, appropriately, Stormy Weather.

Since Lena Horne's death almost a month ago, the airwaves have been full of clips of her great song stylings. Her early film performances proved that a woman of color could be sensual and sophisticated, and her concert appearances showed an artist of great range; she easily moved from sultry seductiveness to cool detachment. It is not surprising that her film career dried up; she spent most of her life in an inter-racial marriage, which made her an awkward presence in segregated Hollywood. Here is a clip (sorry about the poor quality) from her final film appearance, as Glinda in 1978's The Wiz. It's an over-the-top performance of a preachy song, a number which became a second signature tune for her, the first being, of course, "Stormy Weather."




Lena was considered a trailblazer by other women of color in the entertainment world; Halle Barry thanked her for her contribution when she won her Oscar. Horne's funeral was attended by Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Audra McDonald and Vanessa Williams, all of whom would point to Lena Horne as an artist whose commitment to civil rights paved the way for their own careers. As everyone on the planet knows, she died last month at the age of 91.

Friday Dance Party: Moments in The Woods

Into the Woods has been on my mind all week, probably kicked off by the high school production I attended (and wrote about here). It's surely one of my favorite musicals of all time, and probably one of Stephen Sondheim's most accessible (which is why so many high schools and community theaters tackle the project).

When theatrical impresario Noel Craig of the Old Globe died, I wrote a bit about seeing the original production of Into the Woods in San Diego, before it was refined and transferred to Broadway. Even in its gestational period, the play was masterful, intertwining several tales from the Brothers Grimm with an original story by Sondheim and librettist James Lapine.

That subplot, a baker and his wife longing for a child, provided the substance for two of the strongest musical theatre performances I have seen. Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason begin the show as a mismatched pair, but by the story's sad ending, they have learned to grab every available moment in the woods. This short clip reflects their awkward justification for using deceit to achieve their goal:



Gleason won the Tony for her performance (deservedly swiping it from Phantom of the Opera's Sarah Brightman, and her own co-star Bernadette Peters), and it's a blessing that her work is preserved on DVD. That television version includes her showstopping number in Act II, which, unfortunately, is not available out here on the interweb. But take a peek at this snippet of the show's most famous ballad, sung here by Gleason when she returns to the stage for the show's final moments: she has been (SPOILER ALERT) stomped to death by a giant, leaving her husband and newborn son alone:

The 1988 Tony Awards broadcast featured the following clip, which takes a pretty mean hatchet job to the show's various plots. Phylicia Rashad had replaced Bernadette Peters as the Witch, but the rest of the original cast remained. Who knows if this montage (I guess we would call it a mashup of the show's score, thank you Glee) brought in extra audiences. Thankfully, that DVD version is a swell documentation of the theatrical experience which was Into the Woods. If you haven't seen it, do so immediately.

Theatre Droppings: Children Will Listen

I had no business taking a vacation last week; my puritan work ethic argued I had not worked enough to deserve a rest. Naturally, I ignored those logical feelings, and embarked on a second vacation.

I've returned to the scene of so many of my previous crimes, Los Angeles, for more R&R. The trip has been highlighted by the two high school theatre productions I attended. The first, directed by my long-time soulmate Judy, represents the first time I have seen her directorial work since moving from LA in 1993. In fact, the last show of hers I saw, I was in:



Judy has developed the drama department at Notre Dame High School into one of the leading programs in the city. She presents three mainstage shows each year, the last of which I saw last weekend. Its cast was comprised of the advanced acting students in her third year class, who pulled off a little-known romantic comedy called Vacancy in Paradise. I had never seen nor heard of this piece, but the kids did a fine job, even in the face of a last minute replacement actor joining the cast (and by "last minute," I mean 24 hours before Opening). The original student was removed for disciplinary reasons, and was replaced by a junior who was smooth as silk.

The next day, I attended a youth theatre production of the musical Into the Woods. This was produced by an organization which gathers middle and high school students from all over the San Fernando Valley (and beyond), and puts them onstage in a large-scale, fully produced musical (last year, they did Les Miserables!!). I have to admit I walked in expecting to be bored, or horrified, or both (the play was performed in a church sanctuary), but I was very surprised. For a bunch of kids, they did a better-than swell job, with a couple of performers showing real professional promise, in my humble opinion. This group, the Youth Musical Theatre of Woodland Hills Community Church, seems to attract some of the top-notch teen talent in the area. In particular, the gals playing Cinderella and the Witch, and the two gents playing the two princes, had poise and charisma.

I didn't just stumble upon the production; the kid playing Jack is the youngest son of two of my old performing pals, Judi and Stephen Stewart. The three of us played together years ago, in a variety of shows, including a couple of original Robin Hood musicals, and some original Christmas projects as well. The Stewarts have produced a couple of offspring who retained their love of, and talent for, performing. Into the Woods was lucky to have young Daniel Stewart playing the sweetly dull lad whose kleptomania creates major conflict.

Seeing these two shows, with casts filled with young, energized kids sure of their talent and ready to tackle the world, reminds me of my high school days, and those feelings of anxious enthusiasm which accompanied every performance, every rehearsal, every interaction. I've already learned that nostalgia seems an unavoidable (and not unpleasant) side effect of my trips to LA.

Friday Dance Party: A Brotherhood of Tap

I've been enjoying various clips, the past few weeks, of the late, great Lena Horne. While trolling through the available material online, I came upon this fantastic dance sequence from the film which provided her with her signature tune, Stormy Weather. Ms. Horne does not appear in this clip; our Dance Party stars this week are the incomparable Nicholas Brothers.

Fayard and Harold Nicholas were sons of entertainers, and were touring in vaudeville before they hit their teens. They appeared regularly at the Cotton Club, and were reportedly the only black entertainers allowed to mingle with the white patrons. They invented a signature style, which included leaping up and down stairs and leapfrogging each other, a technique which came to be called acrobatic dancing, or "flash dancing". (The technique bears no resemblance to the more modern "flash dance," in which a female factory worker is doused with water.) They influenced several generations of dancers, and included Debbie Allen and Janet and Michael Jackson among their students. Baryshnikov called them the greatest dancers he had ever seen, and Gregory Hines noted that their signature move (the "no-hands split," where they dropped into a full split, then returned to a standing position without use of their hands) would have to be duplicated by computer, if a biography of the duo were ever to be filmed.

If that Nicholas Brothers biopic ever happens, Gregory Hines's brother Maurice may have found the guys to star in it. (The Hines Brothers are in the picture at left.) Maurice is currently starring in Arena Stage's revival of Sophisticated Ladies, a musical revue which originally starred his brother Gregory. The current show is a smash, and Arena has just announced that it is now the biggest grossing production in the theatre's 60 year history. Apparently, another set of brothers provides the highlights of the production. Maurice Hines held extensive local auditions to cast his show, but used only two DC performers, John and Leo Manzari, a couple of high schoolers. They seem poised to become the newest tap-dancing brother-team, in the tradition of the Nicholas and the Hines brothers.

This week's Dance Party shows that the Manzaris have a lot to live up to. This clip from Stormy Weather, starring the Nicholas Brothers, displays a phenomenal feat of stylish athleticism; Fred Astaire called it the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen:

Theatre Droppings: What the Magnolias Saw

I was glad to spend a long weekend in North Carolina, checking up on the pater, and relaxing on his screened porch, overlooking the heavily landscaped backyard complete with waterfall.

That's the life. I have tried to spend more time there in the last few years, and have even worked in the area a bit, but opportunities for me in the Asheville/Hendersonville area have been slow to come, and I am usually pulled back to DC for professional reasons. While in the mountains, I was very glad I caught two shows from the leading professional theaters in the region.

My North Carolina Stage Company, where I did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead over a year ago, was opening Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw. It took our audience a few minutes of tentative tittering before we got into the swing of the piece's style, and then the show really took off. It's the kind of bawdy sex farce at which those Brits really excel, with mistaken identity, cross-dressing, and a horny married couple as its catalyst. This was the strongest production of this play I have seen, with Charlie Flynn-McIver and Vivian Smith providing riotous central performances. I had seen the dramatic work of young Casey Morris in NC Stage's earlier production of The Beauty Lieutenant of Connemara, or whatever that Irish play is where Mother pees in the sink, and he continues to do great work. I had not seen Matthew Burke before, but his performance as the cop was quite wonderful. I have to hand it to director Ron Bashford, who solved some technical issues pretty creatively; I think the show's traditional set calls for a series of doors, perfect for the slamming usual in this kind of farce (somebody in the play exclaims, "Why are there so many doors? Was this house designed by a lunatic?”), but such a set is impractical in NC Stage's thrusty black box, so the director made lemonade. His production proves that an audience does not notice a stage set's limitations if the performances are good, and here, they are terrific. I hear the show has been extended a week.

I was also able to pop out to the Flat Rock Playhouse to see their current offering, Steel Magnolias. That Summer Stock staple is not one of my favorites, but it is certainly a crowd-pleaser among the oldsters who provide the core of the theater's audiences. I had heard that one of my R&G cohorts, Julia VanderVeen (isn't that a great name?) was in the show, so I drove out to Hendersonville to see it. I have previously written about the significance Flat Rock Playhouse has had in my life (I saw my first play there, as a little kid), so it was no sacrifice to attend a show there, no matter what they were doing.

Turns out, the show was a hoot, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It is very much an ensemble piece, but chief among the gals was Pamela Myers, who all Musical Theatre Geeks know by voice if not by name. She introduced the Stephen Sondheim classic "Another Hundred People" to the world, in the original Broadway production of Company, and earned a Tony nod for her efforts.

(That's Myers on the right, with Donna McKechnie and Susan Browning, introducing another Sondheim classic, "You Could Drive a Person Crazy")

Here, she played the proprietress of The Hairport, the beauty parlor which provided the setting for the show (I know such places are now called salons, but my mother, a true steel magnolia, always went to the Beauty Parlor, and I still think of them as such). The performances here were all very strong, and I credit director Scott Treadway with steering the somewhat sitcomish dialogue into more realistic territory. In addition to Ms. Myers, I particularly enjoyed the performance of Rebecca Koon, who delivered Clairee's hilarious one-liners with a refreshing dryness.

And need I say that my friend Julia was a standout? Regular readers of these pages have already discovered the phenomenon that my friends always seem to do outstanding work in their shows, and Julia is no exception. Her role, the squeaky clean Annelle, can come off annoyingly sanctimonious, but Julia effectively tracked her character from mousy doormat to proselytizing missionary, and still made us like her. That's a pretty neat trick.

Steel Magnolias's final scene is probably the main reason the play fails for me, as I find it melodramatic, maudlin, and manipulative. But here again, I offer kudos to director Scott Treadway, who helped his actresses achieve a bit of truth with this sequence; they were rewarded with a standing ovation.

I had an emotional reaction during my visit to Flat Rock, but only part of it was a result of the production. The curtain speech was given by a young, enthusiastic gent whom I assume is the new artistic director of the theater, Vincent Marini. He talked for more than a few minutes before the curtain went up, though he failed to introduce himself to us. About half-way through his speech, I finally assumed he was the new Chief Gee Whiz. He had already finished his promo when he remembered he wanted to say something more. He motioned to the booth to cut the sound (the pre-show music had already begun), and he started talking again. He wanted to introduce the theater's new group of apprentices, who had arrived only a day earlier from around the country, and were going to be in residence at Flat Rock for the next three months.

About twenty or so young, fresh-faced, college-aged kids stood up in the audience, and received probably the only applause they are likely to get all summer. I guess some of them may end up onstage, perhaps in one of the big musicals which Flat Rock produces, but most of the time, they will be working backstage, building in the shops, and helping park cars. Who knows, maybe they weed the lawn, too. But what a terrific experience they will have, living and breathing theatre all summer. Their excitement at being in the theatre that day was palpable, and infectious. I felt a catch in my throat, and a twinge of envy.

I wish someone at my undergrad, California Stage University Northridge, had mentioned the existence of this kind of apprentice program. Most summer stock theatres have them, and have had for decades, where very young actors just beginning their careers gather to live and work to support the theatre's season. It is a terrific way to learn theatre from the ground up, and to begin to forge the friendships which are a great part of a life in the theatre. I would have eaten up an experience like that, but the faculty at CSUN was either ignorant of such programs' educational potential, or just didn't care enough to encourage their students to investigate such opportunities. I never knew these apprentice programs existed until years later, when I started working in such venues as a professional.

hmm. I wonder if Flat Rock Playhouse needs any...um...senior apprentices...