I meant to post this a couple days ago, but...well, y'know, with the news and all...
For what it’s worth, Ed Solomon is a very good screenwriter. (Among other things, he wrote the Men in Black and Bill and Ted…” movies. I interviewed him years ago for a WGA column I did.) I only mention that for perspective. Mainly, I love his joke and the phrasing of it – and it also especially hit home because a friend took his daughter to the Santa Monica beach the other night because she wanted to get a better view of this.
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After another day of the impeached Trump handing out pardons like Halloween treats this week alone to mass murderers, convicted felons who wouldn't testify against him, and the father of his son-in-law who set up his own brother-in-law with a hooker and videotaped it. -- none of them showing remorse or turning their lives around with good deeds -- I decided I needed a palate cleanser. I was going to write about Joe Biden's great press conference on Tuesday, where he blisteringly took Russia to task, blamed them for attacking the U.S. on Trump's watch -- noting that Trump wasn't watching and making clear they should be held accountable and that he would do so if Trump didn't. But good as that was, it was pretty much what you expect for a President. (Although, admittedly, Biden isn't a President yet, and you don't really expect it from a President-Elect. But then when the actual president is AWOL, popping up only for pardoning remorseless convicted felons and vetoing a defense bill, the President Elect pretty much has to step in... Instead we're going to go with Mark Bucher. Mark Bucher owns the Medium Rare steakhouses in Washington, D.D. and Arlington, Virginia. He was on MSNBC yesterday morning talking about his Feed the Fridge initiative, getting free food to those in need, sort of a local version of what the great Chef Jose Andres has built on a national scale. It was wonderful, but what stood out was his enthusiasm to get the government involved, as well as other restaurants. You can read a very good interview with him here, but to go along with that, here is that interview from yesterday, only 3-4 minutes and worth every moment. Here's another song from a TV musical I referenced a couple times the past few weeks, The Stingiest Man in Town. It was a 1956 special on the Alcoa Hour based on Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Many of the names involved might no longer be household ones, but for the day it was a respectable cast, with a couple of full-fledged opera stars in it (Patrice Munsel and Robert Weede, who also starred in the Frank Loesser musical, The Most Happy Fella), as well as pop stars, like Vic Damone, Johnny Desmond, and The Four Lads. Also in the cast was one of my favorite character actors, John McGiver, along with Martyn Green, a leading Gilbert & Sullivan interpreter of the time. And above all, one Hollywood legend as Scrooge. That would be none other than Basil Rathbone, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in the movies from 1936-1946, The score by Fred Spielman and Janice Torre isn't especially memorable, although there are some nice things in it. And I like this one, not just for the song itself, which has a sweet charm to it, but perhaps even more for it being sung by Basil Rathbone. He's no singer at all, but handles the number effectively. I should also note that I like it when songs are written from famous lines in literature, as this is. This number comes from late in the show, after Scrooge has learned his lesson. It takes its title from a line from Dickens when Scrooge has told the Ghost of Jacob Marley that his former partner was always a good man of business, and the specter admonishes him. And so, here, Scrooge has learned that lesson. "Mankind Should Be My Business." I'll toss in a couple of other numbers. We already played the song, "A Christmas Carol" and heard snippets from the title number "The Stingiest Man in Town" done on the Julie Andrews special This first additional tune here is a low-key, sweet piece sung by Martha Cratchit -- who, no, is not Bob's wife but oldest daughter -- performed by Betty Madigan, "Yes, There Is a Santa Claus." Why this minor character got a solo number and not the Mrs., I have no idea. And we'll end things here with a reasonably melodic ballad, "Birthday Party for the King," sung by Johnny Desmond, as Scrooge's nephew Fred. In the Dickens story, Fred is someone who does love Christmas, though tends to be much more fun-loving than the pious character here. But happily, one with a good set of pipes, which ultimately is proper for Christmas.
I was extremely sorry to read about the passing of Rebecca Luker at the age of 59 from ALS. She was one of my very favorite Broadway performers. How wonderful was she? She starred in the revivals of The Sound of Music, The Music Man and Show Boat. And starred as 'Winnifred Banks' in Mary Poppins. She had the most glorious, pure, soaring voice, and I was lucky enough to see her once near the start of her career when I drove down to San Diego to see the pre-Broadway tryout of the musical Harmony, a show I've written about here often (such as here), with music by Barry Manilow -- even though I didn't have a clue who she was at the time. Also in that production was Danny Burnstein, who later went on to star in the recent revival of Fiddler on the Roof...and all the more important, later married Luker. The best I can offer here is a piece I wrote back on October 27, 2015 when I was posted videos from that production of The Music Man. Here's the next video from our festival of the 2000 Broadway revival of The Music Man, which I wrote about yesterday. It also comes from that same Boston Pops concert, which I'm guessing did a tribute to the show. This is Rebecca Luker, who starred as Marian Paroo, singing "Goodnight, My Someone.". Yesterday, I told the story about how a good friend of mine who grew up in New York and saw the original production of The Music Man repeated times and swore by Baraba Cook's original performance, said that it wasn't until seeing Ms. Luker that anyone came close. (Readers of these pages will also recall the many articles I wrote about seeing the World Premiere 1997 production of Barry Mannlow's musical Harmony in San Diego, and Luker was in that show. And not shockingly, was a gem.) When they did a TV version of The Music Man in 2003 with Matthew Broderick, they cast Kristen Chenoweth to play Marian. It always bothered me that they didn't have Rebecca Luker re-create her part. It's not that Chenoweth was better known -- again this was back 12 years ago, and she wasn't. She'd done a few things on TV, but all in small supporting roles. She was largely a Broadway star -- but then, so too was Luker, who had three Tony nominations at that point. (More since.) And great as Kristen Chenoweth's singing is, Luker's voice is, I think, the more proper range for Marian. One odd possibility that I've wondered is that Matthew Broderick is pretty short, and Ms. Chenoweth is extremely short. Rebecca Luker might be taller, and therefore not as good a "fit." Or...maybe they just wanted Kristen Chenoweth. I like her. She was absolutely fine. But I think Rebecca Luker is better for the role. And deserved the chance to re-create it on film. In my article yesterday, I also more accurately described her has "the ethereal Rebecca Luker." If you don't know her work, here's why. For that article, I added a Bonus Note, writing -- "After posting this, I came across Rebecca Luker singing this song onstage during a live performance. I thought about swapping out videos, but I figured that since Craig Bierko got his Boston Pops performance with good sound quality, Rebecca Luker deserved her, as well. But if you want to see that onstage video, as well, just click here. But rather than make you bother going to the effort of clicking today, I'll just post it instead -- And it's only proper that we add one more video from that 2000 revival. Here is the scene leading into the song and then Rebecca Luker singing to Craig Bierko, "Til There Was You." Leading into the following dialogue into their reprise of "76 Trombones" and "Goodnight, My Someone." And we'll end with a finale encore. Here is Rebecca Luker and the Von Trapp children from the 1998 Broadway revival of The Sound of Music" singing "Do-Re-Mi." Happily, videos and albums exist. “I’m counting the hours until he’s gone…I plan to pull him out by his hair, his little hands and his feet.”
-- Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on Trump It wasn't the bluntness of Speaker Pelosi's comment towards a lame duck president that stood out to me yesterday -- and her counting the hours, not the days which requires a calendar rather than a ticking watch -- it was her use of "little hands." As is well-known by now, Trump is deeply sensitive whenever the small size of his hands is ever referenced, seeing it as a reflection on what that purportedly means about the size of another of his important male body parts. By the way, the origin of that sensitivity goes back to January, 1998, when Graydon Carter, co-founder of the bitingly satirical Spy magazine out of New York, wrote an article that described Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” It upset Trump so much that for many years he would send photos of himself, generally torn out of magazines, to Carter with his hands circled in gold Sharpie and a personally-written comment to the side, "See, not so short!" In a 2015 article in Vanity Fair (where he was then the editor), Carter said that the most recent mailing had come earlier that year and added, "I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, 'Actually, quite short.' Which I can only assume gave him fits." The knowledge of that sensitivity -- and the reality that he still would respond to it, even in public -- it a high point in the GOP presidential primaries that same 2015 when Marco Rubio made a reference to it, saying, "I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-foot-2, And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them." That, of course, is not what they say about men with small hands, unless they are trying to clean it up for public consumption, and Trump knew that well. And so, with all the insecurity that the country has come to know, he responded in defense of his hands a week later during an actual presidential debate. "Look at those hands, are they small hands?” he said, holding them up for the world to see, despite being the front-runner as Republican nominee for president of the United States. “And, he referred to my hands – ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee." Never mind that Rubio didn't say that, Trump knew what was meant, and so he brought the presidential conversation down into the scatological gutter. For all I know, it's where the origin of his "Little Marco" insult came from. And Nancy Pelosi most-certainly knew all this. So, not only did she bluntly tell Trump off, she knowingly insulted his manhood. And of course, it wasn't an insult of his manhood from just anyone, but from a woman. And not just any woman, but an 80-year-old woman who was insulting his manhood. And not just any 80-year-old woman, but the most powerful woman in the United States. And on top of insulting his manhood, saying she planned to throw him out. Oh, and the "by his hair" wasn't too shabby as far as insults go, either, especially when dealing with a man famous for his elaborate comb-over. But what perhaps leaped out the most was the response from Republicans in Congress. And that response was -- silence. No outrage, no cries of how unbecoming it was for the Speaker of the House -- and not just any Speaker, but the hated Nancy Pelosi, who Republicans have been fundraising off of for years, indeed decades. Just... silence. Forget the sly insults, just simply saying she planned to throw him out would normally be enough to send Republicans into apoplexy. And not even because it's Nancy Pelosi or a generic Speaker of the House, but have we ever heard any politician be so blunt about getting rid of an outgoing president?? And as far as I can tell, there wasn't a word of complaint from any Republican. I don't think that's necessarily because they didn't want to defend Trump -- they clearly have no trouble with that, even now, as many continue Trump's assault on democracy. The best I can figure is that even they are just weary by it all and heard Speaker Pelosi's response as the natural reaction to Trump Mania. And in the end, that's what you get when your party leader is a short-fingered vulgarian. Tonight we have a sort of Unknown Harnick Festival with three Christmas songs by Sheldon Harnick that you've almost-certainly never heard. In the case of this first song, that's because it's for a musical that never made it to Broadway. The song is a particular sweet number called "One Family," and it's from a show that Harnick wrote based on none other than...A Christmas Carol. Harnick is best-known for his work with composer Jerry Bock on such musicals as Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me and the Pultizer Prize-winning Fiorello! For this, though, he collaborated on the show with famed movie composer, Michel Legrand, who among many film scores wrote The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, as well as the original film version of The Thomas Crown Affair, for which he won an Oscar for the Best Song, "The Windmills of Your Mind." Though their production of A Christmas Carol never was produced on Broadway, it's had a bit of a life in community theater. This number is sung in the show by the Cratchit Family, and it's performed here by Sheldon Harnick, along with his wife Margery Gray (who had a successful Broadway career, including the show Mr. Wonderful that starred Sammy Davis Jr., and oddly enough had music by Jerry Bock before he teamed up with Harnick), and Leigh Beery, who starred as Roxanna opposite Christopher Plummer in Cyrano, a musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. (She comes in with her main solo at the 1-minute mark. Margery Gray follows her.) This (and the two that follow) come from the wonderful CD I've posted several selections from. Sheldon Harnick: Hidden Treasures, which you can find here. These next two Christmas songs were written by Harnick and Bock for their musical She Loves Me (which is based on the Hungarian play that the movies Shop Around the Corner and You've Got Mail are adapted from). However, they're so little-known that people who even love She Loves Me inside-out likely don't even know them. That's because they were cut from the show. The first song, "Christmas Eve," was to come at the very end of the show -- around the time when the "12 Days to Christmas" number, whose video I posted here the other day (12 days before Christmas) comes in. It's a lovely, wistful ballad, but in his liner notes Harnick writes that the song just didn't move the story forward enough and had to be taken out. It's sung here by the composers, with Harnick in the lead. And the final number is probably best-described as a show song, one that really only fits within the context of the musical. Harnick notes that it was ultimately too complex and didn't work well-enough for that, so it too was cut. But it's good fun to hear, especially with Harnick filling in the dialogue. And if you do know the show, you'll recognize that some of the lyrics were saved and able to be used elsewhere in the show, mixed in as a sort of sardonic counterpoint in the song "Ilona." Here then are Hanick and Bock singing, "Merry Christmas Bells."
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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