Friday Dance Party: The Bossa-Nova Balladeer

When this songstress died last week, she took a part of Old Show Business with her.

Eydie Gorme

1928-2013

I suppose history considers the most glamorous years of Hollywood to be its golden age of the 30s and 40s, with the studio system creating glittering stars who showed up to film premieres dripping in fur and diamonds. 

Hollywood Palace, Ed Sullivan, Dean
Martin, Carol Burnett: Gorme was a
glammed-up guest on them all.

But when I think of the glamor of show business, I think of the 60s and 70s, when I was glued to the television, watching entertainers such as Eydie Gorme on variety and talk shows.  It was an era when singers were in tuxedos for the gents, and evening gowns for the ladies.  It was not uncommon to see a star walk onto Johnny Carson's set in formal evening attire;  such a thing would be fodder for comedy on today's talk show circuit.  But I loved watching the glamorous stars of that era singing their tunes on the variety shows of the day, and Gorme was a regular visitor to such programs.

I'm sure the first time I ran across Eydie Gorme, it was as a guest on The Carol Burnett Show.  She appeared regularly throughout the show's run, sometimes with her husband, but just as often solo.

She got her start on a variety show, headed by Steve Allen.  It was on that program that she met Steve Lawrence.  Their marriage was legendary in show business, and they appeared as a couple many, many times on TV as I was growing up. 

The marriage of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme lasted a whopping 55 years, unheard of in show biz circles.  During their heyday in the 60s and 70s, the mere mention of their first names conjured them up.  Like Lucy and Desi, and Liz and Dick, everybody knew Steve and Eydie.

In addition to performing with her husband, Eydie had an ongoing solo career (Steve did, too), including her massive popularity in Latin American culture.  Her recordings with Trio Los Panchos were big hits south of the border, and she was arguably a bigger star in Spanish speaking countries than in the states. 

Eydie's bilingual talents led to a job interpreting at the U.N.
She soon left the diplomatic life to become a star. In Latin
America, she's huge.

She did fine here, though, beginning with a splashy hit called "Blame It On The Bossa Nova" in 1963. The song became an enduring part of pop culture once Gorme made it famous.  It was covered numerous times over the years;  Annette Funicello's recording made a surprisingly hilarious appearance in this moment from The West Wing:

I enjoyed Gorme's interpretations of various Broadway ballads more than her flings with swing.  Over the years, she plucked showtunes from the Broadway stage which reflected love, regret, and determination, then belted them out over the airwaves for wallflowers like me to hear them. 

The Gorme belt turned many a Broadway tune into a
popular song.

There are numerous clips out there of her renditions of such songs, so many that I could not choose which to use for this week's Dance Party.  If you care to, you can go here for her version of "What Did I Have..." from On A Clear Day..., go here for "As Long As He Needs Me" from Oliver, go here for "What I Did For Love" from A Chorus Line, and go here for the title number from The Way We Were (yes, I know that's a film, but what the hell...).  

Our gal's biggest hit from her repertoire
of Broadway Ballads was surely "If He
Walked Into My Life" from Mame. She
won the Grammy for that recording.

Considering her success recording showtunes, it's odd that Eydie Gorme appeared only once on Broadway.  On the strength of the stars' popularity, the show ran over a year, transferring from the Shubert to a smaller house at the end of its run.  Largely forgotten now, Golden Rainbow produced a solid standard tune for Lawrence (and for Sammy Davis, Jr.) in "I Gotta Be Me."  A very young Scott Jacoby was nominated for a Tony, playing Steve's son.

Though it was not a hit on the Billboard charts, "This Could Be The Start of Something Big" is probably the signature song for the Steve and Eydie duo, and the clip below illustrates exactly what I mean when I write of Old Show Business: our gang includes Dinah Shore, Steve Allen, and Ann Southern, all of whom are dressed to the nines and having a ball with this cheesy routine.  I can just imagine all these stars going out to the hottest nightclub after taping their shows, hobnobbing with the other glamour stars of the day;  that's what Show Business meant to me back then. 

Frank came through in a time
of crisis for Eydie.

While not technically part of the Sinatra-Martin-Davis gang which dominated Show Business in the 60s, Steve and Eydie were surely Rat Pack-Adjacent.  They were old friends with the entire group, and their Vegas show was as successful as any.  When the couple's son Michael died in 1986, Sinatra sent his private plane to ferry them home from a concert gig in Atlanta.

I graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1979; a few years later, Steve and Eydie's youngest son Michael enrolled in the department I had just left.  I met the young gent only once, but have friends who worked with him on campus in several musicals, which were warmly supported by his parents.  Michael died very unexpectedly from a heart problem when he was only 23.  Steve and Eydie ceased touring for a year to recover.

In lieu of one of Gorme's ballad performances, this week's final clip comes from an early appearance on the Tonight Show.  She was a regular and welcome guest for both Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, and always brought down the house with her song.  As everybody knows, Eydie died last week, just a week shy of her 85th birthday.  Show Business will never be quite the same to me.

Friday Dance Party: Ribbons Down Her Back

The star of this week's Dance Party died early this week.

Eileen Brennan

1932-2013

When news of Brennan's death became public this week, Facebook filled up with tributes and remembrances of her work.  

Everyone loved Mrs. Peacock, her role in
Clue. I never saw it, but apparently she
delivered a comic speech which is still
quoted today.

That work was most often comedic, as she was rightfully considered an exceptional comic actress. 

When Eileen died, I recalled a little performance she gave in the PBS adaptation of Working, the Musical.  Go here for that clip.



Our gal may be most widely remembered from her performance in the various incarnations of Private Benjamin. 

Her role in Private Benjamin earned an Oscar nomination, which she lost to Mary Steenburgen in Melvin and Howard.  When the film transferred to television, Eileen went with it, and won the Emmy and Golden Globe.

As Zondra, the witheringly acerbic acting coach on
Will and Grace.  The role earned one of her many
Emmy nominations.

Eileen spent a good part of her career in television, earning Emmy nominations for work in Newhart, Will and Grace, Taxi, and thirtysomething.  But her feature film work was also substantial, including memorable roles in The Last Picture Show, The Sting, Murder By Death, and The Cheap Detective.  She spent several months as a regular on Laugh-In, where she became buddies with Goldie Hawn, with whom she later shared the big screen in Private Benjamin.  In 1982, after dining with Hawn, she was critically injured by a passing car;  the injury severely affected her life and her career. 

Her performance in The Last Picture Show was
the beginning of a long association with director
Peter Bogdanovich.

She endured a gruelling three years of rehabilitation after her accident, and struggled for the rest of her life with a dependence on prescription drugs.

As 1959's Little Mary Sunshine.

Eileen Brennan's first splash came with the title role of the Off-Broadway parody of light operetta, Little Mary Sunshine, for which she won the Obie in 1959. 

She's got elegance, as the original Irene
Malloy in Hello, Dolly! That's Charles
Nelson Reilly on the far left.

In 1964, she created the role of Irene Malloy in the original cast of Hello, Dolly!, in which she introduced the Jerry Herman classic ballad, "Ribbons Down My Back."

Known primarily for her film work these days, Eileen spent her early years in musical theatre.  Here she is as Anna in The King And I.

Once she landed in Hollywood, her musical theatre background was largely forgotten, until 1975. 

Brennan was nominated for the Emmy
all three seasons of Private Benjamin,
winning in 1981.

Brennan was a favorite of director Peter Bogdanovitch, who used her in The Last Picture Show (and the sequel, Texasville), as well as in Daisy Miller;  when the director was casting his ill-fated musical At Long Last Love, he cast Eileen in the part of Madeline Kahn's maid.

Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan in At Long Last Love.  This week's Dance Party comes from that notorious project.

At Long Last Love is both despised and admired.  Bogdanovich was attempting to recreate the golden age of film musicals, and used the Cole Porter songbook to construct a musical flambe, which became instead a musical flameout. 

A stellar cast and sparkling cinematography
could not save At Long Last Love.

The film was the first since the 1930s to feature musical numbers which were filmed live, rather than being recorded in advance.  

"C'mon in, this is free!" Perhaps in an attempt to emulate those musical sequences in which Astaire and others filmed the full number in a single shot, Bogdanovich does the same with this week's Dance Party. He does his stars no favors, as their hoofing is occasionally out of sync.  The film has not seen a release on DVD, though a Blu-ray edition has recently become available.  Hopefully you'll enjoy our Eileen returning to her musical theatre roots.

It was a lousy decision, to record the numbers live onset, considering that several of the starring cast were not comfortable singing. 

Once this flop was released, everyone ran for cover.

Eileen Brennan was a breast cancer survivor, but succumbed to bladder cancer this week, at the age of 80.

Friday Dance Party: I'm Gonna Wash That Blood Right Outta My Hair

This week's Dance Party comes as my summer activities reach the two thirds point, and by activities, I mean the productions in Manhattan in which I am performing.  I am spending my summer acting up outside, in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  I worked with this scrappy little company, called Hudson Warehouse, last summer too, in a production of Richard III (I wrote about that experience here and here too).

The Hudson Warehouse loves blood, and even more, they love splattering it all over me.  In both Richard III (above) and in this year's King Lear, I had blood spouting out of various orifices.

This year, I agreed to perform in two of Hudson Warehouse's productions, back-to-back.  In one, The Three Musketeers, I will be playing a small, comic relief role, and we will open that swashbuckler Thursday. But up until yesterday, I have also been engulfed in the dark and hubristic world of King Lear. 

As King Lear's Earl of Gloucester, I had the privilege (if that's the word) of being on the receiving end of one of Shakespeare's most gruesome atrocities:  my eyes are gouged out.  Hudson Warehouse loves blood, and I was drenched in it every night, so much so that I had to dash home for a thorough shower to remove it from my hair and beard.  I think there's still some in my goatee.

King Lear was plagued with lousy weather (ironic, considering much of the play occurs during a storm).  During our final week of rehearsal, which included all our tech/dresses, we were continually aborted by rain.  I mean torrential downpours which kept the cast scurrying toward the nearest overhang, attempting to protect costumes from the gales of rain.

 

Our King Lear opened a month ago, on the opposite side of this
monument, against some substantial odds provided by Mother
Nature.  All rehearsals and performances happen in this
outside space.





Elegant 1980s clothes were not made to wash and wear.
Rainstorms plagued our rehearsal period.

The weather interfered so frequently that we added a rehearsal the afternoon of our preview performance, just so we could run through the full show once before audience members showed up.  And show up they did, with one of our biggest houses.  This preview was on the Fourth of July, and I wonder how many viewers actually meant to be there, and how many others had arrived early for the fireworks display which was to happen on the river once the sun went down.

This is the climactic showdown between my two sons, the legitimate Edgar who was tricked into being disowned, and the bastard Edmund who manipulated his father and brother.  This subplot concerning the Gloucester family runs parallel to the tale of Lear and his daughters.

We had plenty of fireworks on our own, mostly provided by our dynamic King Lear, David Brown.  David was fiery and robust in the role, and I loved playing our scenes "on the heath," when Lear has gone mad, and my character, Gloucester, has been brutally blinded and is wandering around trying to commit suicide.

Oh, but rain was not our only weather issue.  The New York area, as with most of the eastern seaboard, was hit with record breaking heat for days on end. 

With the heat index reaching triple digits, and humidity higher than the Empire State, we canceled two shows.  The Heat was the big news that week in New York City, and the Daily News picked up on our cancellation.  While we were all impressed that our King Lear received this publicity for NOT doing our show, I wondered aloud if we would ever get any press for actually DOING the show.  This comment was not met with much enthusiasm from the Hudson brass.

And in the end, Mother Nature had the last word.  We were to conclude our run yesterday, Sunday, but we were rained out.  Luckily, our Saturday night performance was one of our best, with a very full audience who were very appreciative.  Still, Closing Night Performances (like Opening Night ones) are special, and to be handed one retroactively made the experience feel a bit unfinished.


I did not feel a strong connection to my role of Gloucester when we started rehearsal, but I grew to love the scenes I shared with Jake Russo, above, who played my son Edgar.  I disown him; then, after my blinding, encounter him again as he is disguised as a bum.  The resulting scenes are among the most poignant in the Bard's canon, and I think we played them well.



What does any of this have to do with this week's Dance Party?  Our Friday night performance was also a good one, and it had an unexpected participant, at least for me. 

I've got something in my eye.

During the show, I made several loops around the monument to cross from stage right to stage left.  During one of those trips, I passed a charming family seated on the lawn, having a picnic.  The mother was hugely pregnant, and there was a husband and toddler there as well. Unfortunately, I had removed my contact lenses by then (I learned early on that I could not be wearing the lenses during my "blinding" scene, as copious amounts of blood squirted everywhere, and turned my contacts pink). 

I was pleased to work with Laura
Frye again; we appeared in Taming
of the Shrew a year ago. Go here for
that report.

So, everything was pretty much a blurr as I loped around the monument to make my final entrance.  I was wearing the sunglasses which my character wore after losing his eyes, and my shirt and face were covered in stage blood.

This spot below our playing space was a prime picnic spot.
On Friday, a Manhattan family spread out their blanket,
and listened to the performance of King Lear happening
on the cement stage above them.

I was set to ignore the family seated on the blanket enjoying the evening, but the mother piped up, "Hello, Gloucester!"  I was pretty impressed that she pegged my role from the blood and sunglasses, clearly she was up on her classical theatre.  I was to learn a moment later, from one of my castmates, that the woman on the blanket was Broadway headliner Kelli O'Hara.  In her honor, she stars in this week's Dance Party.

Kelli O'Hara has an exceptional ability to bring new life to older iconic roles.  The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, Sunday in the Park with George, and of course South Pacific (above) have all been reinvigorated by her presence in their revivals. She can take an outrageously corny role such as Nellie Forbush and make you believe such a person actually exists.

Other than this momentary meeting in the park on Friday, I have never seen Kelli O'Hara live, but her performance in the hit revival of South Pacific has been preserved on DVD, which I own and enjoy. 

O'Hara has created her share of musical roles, notably in Light in the Piazza, for which she earned one of her four Tony nods.  Right before she recently withdrew from the theatrical scene to have her second child, she starred in the new musical adaptation of Far From Heaven (above).  She received glowing reviews during its Off-Broadway run;  if the show has a further life, she will surely be attached. 

Kelli was born and raised in Oklahoma (and trained by the same vocal coach who taught Kristin Chenoweth), which may give some clue as to how she can so thoroughly inhabit down-to-earth characters. 

Kelly O'Hara as the 50s suburban housewife
in Far From Heaven.

In this week's Dance Party, she attacks this well-known song so enthusiastically, you can't help but be won over.  If only I had been wearing my contacts last Friday night, I would surely have responded to her sweet greeting with an expression of my admiration of her work.  Perhaps this will do. 

Friday Dance Party: He Stopped Believin'

This week's Dance Party, once again, stars one of the recently deceased.

Cory Monteith

1982-2013

Everybody knows this young actor died this week, from an overdosed mixture of heroin and alcohol.  Only 31, Cory had struggled with addiction since his early teens, and spent some time in rehab as recently as April of this year. 


Monteith and Lea Michele are Glee's central romantic
couple, both on and off screen.

It's sad and discouraging when someone so young is taken, though I confess that Monteith was not a particular favorite of mine.  But the Internet has been buzzing all week about this loss, and it will certainly affect the trajectory of that TV phenomenon, Glee.

Glee provided an earlier Dance Party, in which klutzy Jane
Lynch swing dances with hoofer Matt Morrison.  Go here.

Our hero is Canadian, and after he cleaned up his act the first time (in his mid-teens), he began appearing on the American TV shows which were being shot in his hometown of Toronto.  His audition for Glee was by videotape, and though his musical skills are suspect, his charming naivete is not. 

Kevin McHale as Artie. Glee will
be remembered for its positive
treatment of disadvantaged
teens.

I confess that I have not attempted an episode of Glee in many years, having become so frustrated with it in its second season that I dropped the habit, pardon the goulish pun.  But somebody saw something in Monteith, and he landed the role of the football jock turned glee club enthusiast which anchored the "student" cast of the show.  He has been one of the show's headliners ever since.

The idea that high school jocks would also be performing geeks is foreign to someone my age, but apparently, this crossing over of various high school cliques really does happen these days.

Glee, as I mentioned, is a bit of a phenomenon: after several years of sliding ratings, it was a surprise that it was recently given a multi-year renewal.  It's unprecedented, that a show with declining ratings be given a commitment by a network for two more seasons, but Glee received just that in April. 

Both Neil Patrick Harris and Gwyneth Paltrow have won Emmys for guest shots on Glee, but Jane Lynch is the only regular to win for her performance.  The tally of the show's Emmy nominations has been declining, as usually happens with aging programs.

The show these days is a messy hodgepodge with a huge canvas of characters;  the program has run long enough that the initial group of kids has graduated high school and gone on to adult life. 

Glee often devotes full episodes to a single artist's music.
Jane Lynch's Madonna-Vogue sequence is well remembered.

Glee attempts to cover them all, as well as new students joining the current high school's club, and I understand the show these days is bloated and unwatchable.

This shot reflects the cast of the first season.  These days, the show's canvas is even bigger, covering original characters as they begin professional show biz careers, as well as current members of the glee club.

But Glee is a phenomenon for another reason:  it has gained unexpected and spectacular success in the recording arena.  Producers have shrewdly released recordings of each episode's songs on I-Tunes, the day of each episode's airings, and the results have been nothing short of phenomenal. 

This scene from the pilot episode became a defining moment for Glee. The original six members of the glee club sing "Don't Stop Believin'" in an empty theatre, secretly observed by the teacher who is losing the fight to keep the club in existence. The song's recording became a million seller, and launched Glee's success in the record world.

In 2009, Glee placed 25 singles on the Billboard top 100, a number which was beat only by the Beatles in 1964.  The next year, Glee shattered that record, placing a whopping 80 singles on the Billboard chart, far outpacing any other musical act in history. 


Glee albums include compilations of love songs, dance tunes,
Christmas carols, and this soundtrack to their episode dedicated
to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

It must be noticed, however, that most of these singles dropped out of the top 100 after only one week.  But physical CD sales of the show's various compilations have also been strong sellers, and Glee's inaugural single, 'Don't Stop Believin'", which appeared in the pilot episode, has been classified as a platinum hit (selling over a million copies).

Alex Newell as Unique is an example of Glee's ongoing commitment to presenting characters of diversity.  The character, new last year, is a transgender teen.  The Glee canvas has always included those of differing races and sexual orientations.

This week's Dance Party is not one of those big sellers, but it's a very sweet scene.  It must come from season 3 or 4 of the series, I did not see its original airing.  The song brings to a close a story line which earned high marks from the LGBT community, and which earned Cory's costar Chris Colfer a Golden Globe. 


Monteith and Colfer have a sweet chemistry.

Monteith, as I said, played a jock, and Colfer plays a role written specially for him, a flamboyantly gay boy infatuated with his straight friend. 

Darren Criss and Chris Colfer broke some ground as Glee's first
gay romance.  The show also features a lesbian couple.

In this story arc, Monteith's single mother dated, and then wed, Colfer's single father, resulting in the two boys becoming step-brothers, and ultimately, friends rather than antagonists.  Cory Monteith inadvertently ended his own life this week, and in his honor, enjoy this sentimental wedding clip: