Larraine and Rognan

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[Some of you must have noticed that I've neglected the blog big time this year. It's not that I've lost interest in physical comedy. In fact, in New York I've been busy directing physical comedy, and this week I'm in Barcelona teaching it at Jango Edwards' Nouveau Clown Institute. Nope, the problem is that I've gotten involved with other stuff, the main one being learning Spanish! Had been meaning to do it for over 40 years, and now I've thrown much of my spare time into it. But the plan is to get back to the blog, and here's a post to prove it.]

My favorite eccentric dancer, our guest blogger Betsy Baytos, sent me this clip of the comedy dancing duo Jean Larraine and Roy Rognan, who I must admit I had never heard of. It's from the 1942 movie The Fleet's In, whose plot — much like the better-know Stage Door Canteen a year later — involves visiting a USO canteen, a night club catering to World War II soldiers on leave. In other words, an excuse to present variety acts, for which we can be very grateful.

Here's the very funny clip, Larraine & Rognan performing with a bemused Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra. The switching back and forth between sheer elegance and pure cartoon is dazzling and well-nigh perfect.





The duet, who were husband and wife, also appeared in the 1943 musical, Salute for Three, but I haven't been able to locate that, even on VHS. Their career was cut tragically short while on tour in '43 with the USO when their plane carrying 39 people, including 7 entertainers, crashed off the coast of Portugal, killing 14. 

Larraine survived; Rognan did not.

According to this report, "Jean Lorraine, in addition to losing her husband, had seven teeth knocked out, hurt her back, and crushed her right leg.  She had been  a comedy dancer with her husband, but after the tragedy she became a singing comedienne.  She changed her name to Lorraine Rognan to keep her husband's name alive.  She was on crutches for seven and a half months, but she showed the same kind of bravery as the men in her audiences.  She entertained at the Hollywood canteen while still on crutches, then went overseas again a year after the accident to fulfil her contract with the USO.  Her husband's death didn't meet the criteria spelled out in the literature, which said the life insurance was ''valid in case of death from all causes except airplane accident or act of war.'  In what surely must have been one of the cruellest blows of all, Time Magazine reported that Jean's accident cost her fourteen thousand dollars."

I hope she had at least some inkling that her work would live on for future generations.

The Physics of Ye Olde Tablecloth Pull

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I don't know about you, but I still remember as a kid upsetting my parents by trying the old trick of yanking a tablecloth out from underneath some dishes and glasses with, er, mixed results. I've also written about this trick, including an advanced variation, in this blog post.  But now I can offer a more scientific explanation....

First a little background: there's an organization and web site, coursera.org, that distributes free, interactive online classes from major universities. I decided to enroll in "How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Objects" because, well, I'm interested in that kind of stuff. And here's the professor, Louis Bloomfield of the University of Virginia, beginning his very first lecture with — you guessed it — the tablecloth trick.

While Bloomfield makes a distinction between the scientist who shows how things work and the magician who hides things, he is in fact being a bit tricky here himself. For example, he says he's adding a degree of difficulty by pouring wine into the glass. Yes, the spilled wine would make a mess, but of course the added weight makes the glass less likely to tip over in the first place. And removing the wine bottle from the table hardly seems insignificant. Because of its shape and higher center of gravity, the wine bottle is far more likely to be displaced than the plate.

His very next demo is conisderably more interesting and uses a trick I'd never seen:

Drew Richardson is visiting and we were watching this together, leading us to brainstorm on how this could be turned into a clown bit. Hmm... It might be hard to find a reason to be sticking a pencil in a Coke bottle, but what if the pencil were a straw, a straw that somehow you couldn't insert in the usual manner? But wouldn't a straw, because it's so light, be more affected by air currents and be in danger of missing the opening? Maybe you could make your own "straw" out of heavier material. In fact, the object wouldn't have to be hollow so long as there were an opening visible on each end. (3D printer, anyone?) Now for the hoop. You can see why you'd need it rather than, say, a rectangular frame (too much friction), but what would the excuse be for having a hoop handy? A hat band? It would have to be perfectly circular. A spring-form pan?? Well, you get the idea. I'm sure this is how Grock worked.

Anyway, good stuff, and the course just started this week, so if you want to enroll, just go to coursera.org. Did I mention that it's free?

Bill Irwin & David Shiner in "Old Hats"

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I must admit I feared a let-down might await me last night as I went to see the new Bill Irwin / David Shiner production, Old Hats. Too much talent! Expectations way too high!! Plus weren't these guys turning 63 and 60 this year?

Nellie McKay

Well, yes they are, not that you'd know it from Old Hats. This is an impressive production, full of new, richly textured material, and as physical as anything I've seen them do. They do get a few breathers while a band led by cabaret singer and comedienne Nellie McKay entertains us, but this may have as much to do with elaborate costume changes as it does with stamina.

Old Hats, as directed by Tina Landau, comes across as a loving tribute to vaudeville and in fact takes the form of a traditional variety show, though one with electronic title cards and state-of-the-art video effects. Most of the material is mostly new, but they are clowns, so of course lots of business from their past work surfaces throughout. And there are a couple of old favorites performed intact: Bill does his Italian waiter routine, juggling plates full of "spaghetti," that I first saw him do in the Pickle Family Circus in the 70s. David again directs his silent cowboy movie with a cast of audience volunteers, a feature of their Broadway show, Fool Moon. As for the new stuff, no duds, but these were the highlights for me:

• After an opening of our intrepid duo escaping from a cosmic wormhole (video projected onto the back wall) and the noisy entrance through the audience of the late-arriving band, Irwin and Shiner settle into a classic softshoe routine where they try to outdo each other with fancy footwork and hat tricks even fancier than in previous shows. They are both technically amazing, though no clown and few dancers can match Bill Irwin's fluidity of movement.
• "The Businessman," a solo piece by Bill brilliantly combining movement with technology, beginning with a battle between his iPhone and iPad and ending with his identity being swallowed whole by larger-than-life electronic media. Reminiscent of his work in Largely New York, though much more ambitious and fully realized.
• "The Encounter," in which two doddering old men get on each other's nerves while waiting for a train. Their oversized costumes give them room for all sorts of bodily metamorphoses. A sweet and touching piece that seamlessly blends physical comedy with rich character work.
• A magic act performed by a pair of third-rate artistes. Shiner's magician is a creepy delight, defined perfectly by his own idiosyncratic idea of flashy movement. Irwin is hysterical as his female assistant, ever jealous of the old guy's flirtations with the younger ladies in the first row. And, yes, they do some real magic, including sawing a woman from the audience in half. This kind of parody has been done before, but the interplay of these two characters was absolutely delicious.

A lot of NYC clowns were there last night, and as fate would have it, David Shiner picked our own Missus Clown, aka Kelly Anne Burns, to play the damsel in the Cowboy Movie. Of course she stole the show. (Click to enlarge.)

Kelly told me afterwards that when she was on stage, Shiner whispered to her to "ham it up because this guy  [meaning another volunteer] is a dud!" and when she got to the death scene "to go really long."

As far as I can tell, the show hasn't officially opened, but it has already sold out its regular run through the end of March. A week has been added in April, and rumor has it that a second week will be added, but those tickets are $75.

You can learn more about the show and buy (April) tickets here.

You can watch the PBS documentary, Bill Irwin, Clown Prince, right here.

Click here to watch Nellie McKay perform "Feminists Don't Have a Sense of Humor" around the corner from me at Cooper Union's Great Hall, back in 2008. She does this one in Old Hats, but "Sarah Palin" becomes "Michelle Bachman." Thanks to  Mary Dohnalek for the link!

Update: Click here for a NY Times preview article (not a review) of the production, in which I am reminded that they did an earlier version of "The Encounter" in Fool Moon.

Update: Click here for all the reviews, courtesy of stagegrade.com.

Complete Book: Victor Hugo's "L'Homme qui Rit / The Man who Laughs"

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Just following up on my previous blog post on the Stolen Chair Theatre Company's "silent film for the stage" production of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs....

I'm a fan of Hugo but have not read this one, but thought I might like to. Or you would, so here's another entry in my "Complete Book" series, the novel in a downloadable and printable pdf. The first document is in the original French, the second in English translation. (For more complete books, see sidebar.) As always with Scribd, use the controls at the bottom of the window to maximize your viewing pleasure.

  

The Man Who Laughs

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There have been lots of modern movies made in the style of 1920s silents, many of them quite good, but only a smattering of theatre productions attempt to recreate that aesthetic on stage in front of a live audience. In fact, it makes no sense at all, since the time and space constraints of the proscenium preclude many of the crowd-pleasing elements we associate with silent film....

But as Galileo said, "and yet it moves." And, in the case of The Man Who Laughs, a "live silent film for the stage" by New York's Stolen Chair Theatre Company, it moves and works quite well indeed.

The 1928 film

This revival of their well-received 2005 production takes as its source not a silent film comedy, but Victor Hugo's melodramatic novel, The Man Who Laughs (1869), which was in fact made into a silent film in 1909 (France), in 1921 (Germany), and in 1928 (U.S.A.), though the latter did have a synchronized audio track of music and sound effects.  There have been at least three very loosely adapted sound versions, the most recent released a mere two months ago and co-starring tax-evader Gerard Depardieu.

"L'Homme Qui Rit" (2012)

In one long, run-on sentence: it's the story of a boy who has his face violently disfigured into a permanent smile and who ends up touring  the hinterlands in a caravan with a traveling showman (think Anthony Quinn in La Strada, only sweet), where his freakish appearance gets laughs and draws crowds, but what he really wants is be taken seriously and, well, we all know that's not gonna work out in the end, don't we? (Take that, my 6th-grade teacher!) Did I mention it's a melodrama?

Photo by Carrie Leonard

But the story is oddly compelling, which is why there are those six movies. In terms of clowning, it mines the popular image (cliché?) of the clown as a misunderstood soul who yearns to play Hamlet (or in this case, Othello). Indeed, haven't many highly successful comedians been eager to take on ultra-serious acting roles late in their careers? Think Charlie Chaplin (Monsieur Verdoux), Danny Kaye (Skokie), Art Carney (Harry & Tonto), Jackie Gleason (The Hustler), Milton Berle (numerous tv dramas), and Jerry Lewis (King of Comedy)— not to mention Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, and Bill Irwin.

Photo by Carrie Leonard

In terms of physical comedy, the silent acting of course calls for heightened precision and a movement vocabulary that is expressive without being overly stiff. The challenges, I am happy to report, are well met in this production. The performers are up to the task, and Dave Droxler in the title role makes full use of his strong clown background and, in a brilliant marionette sequence, his fluid movement skills.

What I was most struck by, however, was how well all of the elements came together, from the acting, to the musicianship of composer/pianist Eugene Ma, to the spot-on grayscale visual design (sets by Michael Minahan, costumes by Julie Schworm, lighting by Daniel Winters, makeup by Jaclyn Schaefer), to the flowing narrative and witty title cards of playwright Kiran Rikhye, all melded into a convincing whole by director Jon Stancato. Art is in the details, and here attention was devoted to every little moment.

Here's a  Jim Moore video interview with director Jon Stancato and lead actor Dave Droxler, from Jim's fantastic blog, Vaude Visuals:



 And here's a review of the production by Ashley Griffin, our musical theatre guest poster, who first alerted me to the show and brought me along on opening night, thank you very much.

The show plays through February 24th. Click here for ticket information.

Click here to watch the 1928 silent film on youTube in 11 installments. Or rent it from Netflix...

Update:  Click here for the NY Times review.