When Legends Meet
On the TV series How I Met Your Mother, the character played by Neil Patrick Harris had a catchphrase, "Legendary." It was an amusing mantra for him, but just to be clear --
-- this is legendary.
Yesterday, I had a post and videos here about Sophie Tucker, "the last of the red hot mamas." In part because I thought they were great fun, but in large part because I wanted to provide some background for those who've never heard of her, since that helps appreciate this joyous video below.
It's 11 minutes of Sophie Tucker and Maurice Chevalier on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1958. As far as I know, it's the only time they ever performed together. At the very least, the only time on television.
There are a lot of fun things about the video, not the least of which is that it all begins with four minutes of dialogue between them, though more of a monologue by Chevalier, about when the first met 35 years earlier, all -- we soon discovered -- to set up their first song.
And what a treat that first song is, since it's Chevalier's famous duet number from the Oscar-winning Best Picture Gigi -- "I Remember It Well."
(One note. She goofs up one of the lines, though it goes so smoothly, barely noticeable -- except you'll hear it doesn't rhyme. It comes in the passage where he sings, "That brilliant sky," and the correct responding line is, "We had some rain" but she instead repeats an earlier phrase, "There was none that night"...which oddly, but happily sort of fits.)
And then it all ends with an unexpected medley. It's of their most famous songs, but the fun is that rather than performing their own hits, they each sing the other's. What's fun to note, too, is that as outrageous a chew-the-scenery performer as Sophie Tucker is, and she was one of the most legendary best at that, which was blatantly clear from the videos I posted of her yesterday (hey, she wasn't called "last of the red-hot mamas" for nothing), it turns out that he is an even far-bigger ham.
I'm sure everyone won’t love this to the same extent I do – but if you’re someone who appreciates the popular culture history that this is, it’s spectacular.
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