Mickey Rooney (1920–2014)

[post 369]

Remember the excitement you all felt when you decided that, gosh darn it, we're going to convert this run-down junk heap into a snazzy theatre and put on a show that will knock 'em dead? Well, that kind of enthusiasm no doubt predates Mickey Rooney by a few millennia, but he sure did come to personify it in all those MGM movies with Judy Garland. And what better representative of the eternal optimism of show business than Rooney? At 93, he was not only one of the last of the vaudevillians—having joined his parents' act at the age of 17 months—but was even a veteran of the silent film era. Just a couple of weeks ago (!!) a print was found of Mickey's Circus from 1927, in which he played the ringmaster of a kids' circus.

In Mickey's Circus (1927)

I do have two personal memories connected to Rooney. In 1980 or so I had the pleasure of seeing Rooney (and Ann Miller) live when he revived his career with the Broadway musical Sugar Babies. This was based on the heyday of American burlesque, which was fitting since his mother had been a dancer in a burlesque chorus line. The show itself was sanitized and corny, but Rooney was funny, super energetic, and had the audience eating out of his hands. It ran on Broadway for three years and he toured with it for another four.

Much much earlier, 1959 to be exact, Rooney's son Teddy had been cast to star in a TV production of The Ransom of Red Chief, based on the O'Henry story. Unfortunately, Teddy was apparently as wild as his father and as bratty and impossible to control as the hyperactive character he was portraying. NBC was understandably in a panic. This was most likely a live performance so they couldn't take any chances. That's where I came in. I was hired to learn the part and be ready to play it in case of a meltdown, though I believe without the Rooneys ever even knowing about it. As things turned out, young Teddy calmed down and did the show (and had a bit of a career as an actor), and meanwhile I lost my chance to perform with two other legends, William Bendix and Hans Conried. Close but no cigar.

Rooney was a fine actor, comedian, dancer, and musician, and I've included a few clips below that show he was no slouch when it came to physical comedy.

Here he is tap dancing at the age of 12 or 13 in Broadway to Hollywood. (Thanks to Hank Smith for the link.)

Puck's final speech from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rooney played the role as a 13-year-old in Reinhardt's stage production at the Hollywood Bowl, and then in the movie about a year later.




Here's a physical comedy gem from Love Laughs at Andy Hardy, as Mickey (who on a good day was 5' 2"/157cm.) does his best dancing with a much taller partner. The two-shot slide thru her legs looks faked, but other than that legit and funny. Some good moves and some great takes by Rooney.




You won't find Sugar Babies on DVD, but Rooney and Miller did perform an excerpt on the 1980 Tony Awards Show. The comedy partnering starts just short of the 2-minute mark. (They also did a version of this at a gala at the Kennedy Center.)




Links:
The NY Times obituary.
The Sugar Babies cast album.
See a video of the Broadway production of Sugar Babies at the Lincoln Center library.
The official Mickey Rooney web site.

Book Report: "Fool," a Comic Novel by Christopher Moore

[post 214]

The only chance you or I will have to see Bill Irwin play the fool in King Lear (see previous post, below) would be a visit to the NY Public Library for the Performing arts, whose Theatre on Film & Tape Archive offers a second chance to see most of the major shows mounted in New York, as well as a few regional offerings. (Not guaranteeing they'll have it, though.) Meanwhile you can have a lot of LOL fun by diving into the wacky antics of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel, Fool, a loose and raunchy retelling of King Lear from the fool’s point of view.

Moore is a top-selling comic novelist who very much enjoys being outrageous. His novel Lamb, for example, recounts the missing early years of the life of Jesus (aka Joshua), as told by "Biff, the Messiah's best bud." Not surprising, then, that his bold imagination does not cower before the monumental status of what many consider to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s not that he doesn’t respect Shakespeare, because he does:

If you work with the English language... you are going to run  across Will’s work at nearly every turn. No matter what you have to say, it turns out that Will said it more elegantly, more succinctly, and more lyrically — and he probably did it in iambic pentameter — four hundred years ago. You can’t really do what Will did, but you can recognize the genius that he had to do it. But I didn’t begin Fool as a tribute to Shakespeare; I wrote it because of my great admiration for British comedy.

Christopher Moore

British comedy cited in his afterword includes Monty Python, the Goons, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Douglas Adams, Nick Hornby, and Eddie Izzard.

Moore does not buy into the traditional view of history, where great men, usually with noble motives, lead us poor commoners forward for the greater good and, if they err, the flaw is tragic, not endemic. Au contraire. This is the underbelly of history, where the mighty are totally corrupt, totally in it for wealth and sex, and anyone who can manage it beds everyone they fancy, with varying degrees of mutual consent.

Into this mess of greed and carnality steps one Pocket, Moore’s version of Lear’s fool: "The castle’s awash in intrigue, subterfuge, and villainy — they’ll be wanting comic relief between the flattery and the murders.”

_____________________________

“The fool’s number is zero, but that is because he represents the infinite possibilities of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be."

_____________________________

You don't need to have seen or read King Lear to follow and enjoy Fool. Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, the story contains the major events and some of the language from the source, but with plot twists more radical than anything in Stoppard's more faithful take on Hamlet. Not only does Fool borrow elements from other Shakespeare plays, such as the three witches, but the fool's clandestine machinations are what drives the altered plot forward, starting with him conceiving and writing Edmund's treacherous letter. And (spoiler alert) it is eventually revealed that the fool and his apprentice Drool turn out to share an ancient bond to Lear’s own family saga.

Moore's writing is continually witty, and he delights in juxtaposing famous passages from the original with his own more down-to-earth language. Lear famously rages against the storm — "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" — and then turns to Pocket to say "It’s really fucking cold out here.” Or when in the opening scene Lear tells Cordelia "you’ll get nothing for nothing; speak again," the fool is quick to interject "Well, you can’t really blame her, can you? I mean you’ve given all the good bits to Goneril and Regan, haven’t you? What’s left, a bit of Scotland rocky enough to starve a sheep and this pox river near Newcastle?"

I'm not so sure Moore sustains the momentum for all of his 357 pages — some of the riffs do get repetitive, sometimes he tries too hard to show how clever he can be. The end result is not necessarily great literature, but it is a funny and breezy read, a thought-provoking, weird-sister concoction that is equal parts Shakespeare, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lenny Bruce.

Bill Irwin Plays King Lear's Fool

[post 213]

Never content to rest on his clown laurels, nor to just stick with well-paying movie gigs, Bill Irwin has consistently returned to the stage to star in ingenious pieces of his own creation or to take on challenging works by Beckett, Brecht, Moliere, Fo, Feydeau, and Shakespeare.

He is now at the Public Theatre, all of a block from my apartment here in New York, playing the Fool to Sam Waterston's King Lear, and your intrepid reporter is there. Oh wait, no I'm not. It's $85, the production got bad reviews, and it closes tomorrow. Three strikes and I'm out.

While the production was mostly panned, Bill's reviews were much better, especially in the New York Times:

You can read the whole Times review here.
You can read 20 — count 'em, 20 — more reviews at the Stagegrade web site.

The only video trailer for the show is here, but it's only about Waterston and it's all talking heads with no actual performance footage. More fun is this old Lear parody by Bill, one of the Clown Bagatelles that served as an afterpiece to his 1987 Regard of Flight. This is very much in the style of 19th-century talking clowns such as Dan Rice, who delighted in comic summations of Shakespearean plays.

Bargain Bundle: Tumblers, Shakespeare, Abbott & Costello, Subway Cars & Scholarly Tomes

[post 181]

Here's a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on....

First clue: flash back to last spring. I'm on a crowded E train from JFK airport when a quartet of performers bound onto the train, loudly  announcing their act with no little modesty. More hip-hop popping I'm guessing, ho-hum, which is why I don't bother to whip out my Flip camera. Suddenly these guys burst across the length of the car in a flurry of handsprings and somersaults and some nifty partner moves, all dangerously close to their (truly) captive audience — "if I touch you, I'll give you a dollar." I especially like the peanut rolls (double forward roll holding each other's ankles) because they have to make precise, last-second detours to avoid impaling themselves on the car's vertical poles.

I really didn't think you could do any of that on a standing-room-only subway train bolting along at 40 mph. I was wrong. Unfortunately, at under two minutes, by the time I got my camera out, they were gone. A YouTube search turned up nothing, but inspired by the next act in this post, I searched again yesterday, this time successfully. I still don't know who they are, but this is definitely them.

Because camera angles are a challenge in a subway car, here are two views of the same act:







And then yesterday I noticed a NY Times article on two performers, Paul Marino and Fred Jones, who call themselves Popeye & Cloudy and who are no strangers to subway floors. They have been earning a reputation and a fair amount of loot by doing another form of action drama underground, casting the passengers as groundlings as they perform quick renditions of scenes from Shakespeare, favorites being Romeo's suicide and Macbeth's decapitation. Not only that, but they also throw in some Abbott & Costello as well; yes, Who's on First?

Read the whole article here.

"Not all subway lines are well suited to Shakespeare," writes a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in an earlier article. "The long cars of the N and R trains allow for a bigger audience per scene. And the J,M,Z trains, which cross the Williamsburg Bridge, give riders time to relax for a lengthy performance. Riders who frequent the 4,5 and 6 trains in Manhattan are out of luck: those lines are too crowded for a proper death scene or sword fight, the actors say."

Here's the Popeye & Cloudy website.
Here's that article from the Wall Street Journal and a short WSJ video.




If you want to see more, here's a 12-minute Vimeo video montage that includes some of the Who's on First.


Popeye & Cloudy from Paul Marino on Vimeo.


So speaking of Shakespeare, and hopefully bringing this post full circle, here's some more chapter two material, this time two complete public domain books on the fool characters in Shakespeare's plays.


Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama by Olive Mary Busby
Our first dusty, musty book answers that eternal question, "whence came this insistent demand of the English public for the buffooneries of the fool?" Okay, so I exaggerated; it was never published as a book, it's just a 1923 master's thesis. Hard to believe, but it cost money to publish books back in what is now known as the Pre-PDF Era. I'm guessing Olive Mary Busby went to her grave not knowing that this blogopedia would make her famous.

Fools Elizabeth an Drama



The Fools of Shakespeare by Frederick Warde
This 1913 work starts with a chapter on "the fool in life and literature," followed by individual chapters devoted to each of Shakespeare's principal fool characters, including: Yorick, Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Launcelot Gobbo, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and the fool in King Lear.
Fools of Shakespeare


That's all I got!

Pink Tights & Plenty of Props

[post 135]

Comedians and clowns have been parodying Shakespeare for centuries now, and “reduced Shakespeare” companies have become somewhat of a comedy franchise since the 80s.  Here’s a nice physical Rowan Atkinson piece, a fake lecture on Shakespearean acting from 1991. Despite the title, his tights are not pink and there aren't all that many props — but a great title nonetheless. Atkinson is best known for his Mr. Bean character, but his range is much broader.  The following piece, which co-stars Angus Deayton, is just one example.

So the moral is:  don’t fall on your knees.