My father imagined himself in the tradition of the great old British actor/managers of yore—he was English, and for decades he ran summer stock theaters where he regularly directed, acted and consulted on everything from design to promotion.

That actor/manager model seems ancient now, at least in the professional theater. But they were still firmaments in the West End theatrical landscape when my father was a child.

The end of that era is chronicled in the grandiose, generously melodramatic comical-drama series The Bretts, has gotten a full-blown 6-CD box set treatment from Acorn Media. No bonus features, but they’re not required; theater history books exist in other media, and the glories of series co-creator Rosemary Anne Sisson (writer of Upstairs, Downstairs and many, many British mystery shows in the 1970s and ‘80s) have been sung elsewhere. As an artistic entity, The Bretts is as self-contained as the multi-faceted theater family it’s about.

Charles Brett is an actor/entrepreneur who has spent a lifetime burnishing his own legend. He owns a London theater and is scion of what has become a famous theater family. He’s played Norman Rodway, an actor now in his 80s but who got a lot of press last year for the director’s-cut reissue of Barry Hershey’s 1995 film A. Hitler, in which Rodway plays the title role. While Charles Brett is not a fascist dictator, he unleashes a mean scowl when his ego is bruised. This occurs multiple times an episode, since even he can see that his small empire is crumbling due to fickle audiences, the new medium of motion pictures, and other constrant threats to his livelihood. (More than one adventure concerns someone on the theater staff absconding with funds, and there’s a non-stop disdain for critics and reporters.)

Charles’ wife is the company’s diva Lydia Brett (Barbara Murray, who as a movie starlet in the 1950s and ‘60s appeared in Passport to Pimlico and a couple of the Dirk Bogarde Doctor in the House films; she was on TV steadily from the ‘60s through the ‘90s, including The Power Game and The Pallisers). Lydia’s concerned about aging but also cognizant that by having such an illustrious career she has become a national treasure. (We see her opening the London production of Strike Up the Band and being courted by Broadway, radio and the movies). When not acting, Lydia frets about her children, three of whom haven’t flown far from the nest: Edwin, a middling leading-man type actor (David Yelland); Martha (Belinda Lang, who went on to several other British TV series), an actress with genuine star quality who applies a risk-taking approach to both her onstage and frolicsome offstage activities; and Thomas (George Winter) , a young playwright whose radical, non-commercial dramas challenge the theater traditions exemplified by his parents.

There is a revelation about Thomas early in the series, and quite a lot of violence and tragedy delivered upon The Bretts’ chauffeur, butler and kitchen staff. But it’s all secondary to the changes in British society during the 1920s and ‘30s. We see the rise of silent movies (in which Edwin becomes a bigger celebrity than his father) and the rise of Socialism. Martha dates a conservative politician. A relative of the chauffeur Hegarty (Billy Boyle, who joins the cast in episode two when the Bretts decide to purchase a motorcar) gets targeted by the IRA.

In the late ‘80s, The Bretts was derided by TV critics as too obvious a knock-off of Upstairs, Downstairs, since both shows involved writer Rosemary Anne Sisson and both contrasted the activities of the upper-class inhabitants of a London house with the decidedly different pursuits and perspectives of their servants. It also didn’t help that both shows were featured in the U.S. as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre. But if comparisons insist on being drawn, The Bretts makes much better use of its multi-class, multi-media elements than Upstairs, Downstairs. It needs all its elements because it’s about more than daily living in changing times. It plunges its characters into new industries, new movements and new ways of thinking. Its reach is global—there are obnoxious Americans in numerous episodes, and in one of my favorites, Thomas goes to Berlin where he meets Bertolt Brecht, hooks up with a dubious example of faded European royalty and is presumed homosexual.

There are the sort of contrivances you expect from shows that play dramatic fiction in front of historical backdrops. But a lot of the connections are subtle, or told with empathy rather than sensationalist stereotyping. The characters range from extreme traditional to extremely radical to extreme criminal to extremely naïve, but they’re not played extreme. Since the world in which The Bretts dwell is so outwardly theatrical, there’s a special effort made to make them—and their servants, colleagues, lovers, hangers-on…—seem human.

As far as the theater history aspect of the show is concerned, it’s as useful as any textbook on British theater in the first half of the 20th century. We’re shown how performing styles clashed, how censorship restrictions loosened, how social issues were finding a place in contemporary mainstream dramas well before the 1950s. We see The Bretts stage an old-fashioned musical theater holiday panto, and we see them acclimate to radio drama and silent pictures. We also get a sense of what it was like to run a theater business at the turn of the 20th century, and how much that business changed with the advent of mass media.

I haven’t seen The Bretts since it first aired a quarter-century ago, when my father and I would look forward to watching it together. Rediscovering it through Acorn Media’s much-welcome box set (an earlier, less prettily packaged 5-disk set came out from another company in 2003, but quickly disappeared), I was surprised at how many episodes there were: 13 in season one, another six in season two. I see from the PBS website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/91/91.html that there were only eight weeks of Season One of The Bretts on Masterpiece Theatre; were some of those double-length slots, or did some episodes never air in the U.S.? No matter; all 19 are here now, smartly cleaned up and looking much crisper than a lot of ‘TV transfers of this vintage.

I blew through this whole set gleefully in a matter of days, and intend to rewatch it in full very soon. It holds up a lot better than some of those tiresome plays-within-teleplays it stages. Though it’s not afraid to show the sexism, violene, corruption and other horrors of its era, everything about The Bretts is theater-savvy, in-jokey and entertaining. It not only mocks those heavy-handed old stage melodramas, it learns from them.

The list is extensive. Highlights: 1981’s parody of 42nd Street (which featured then-SNL cast member Christine Ebersole, who 20 years later would appear in the Broadway revival of 42nd Street—in the same role she’d mocked on TV). 1994’s obscure Masters of Monologue battle between Adam Sandler as Eric Bogosian and Michael McKean as Spalding Gray. Jon Lovitz’ recurring impersonation of Harvey Fierstein. Last season’s Best of Both Worlds bit, with Hugh Jackman (Andy Samberg), Gerard Butler (Taran Killam) and Julie Andrews (Helen Mirren) boasting about their flexibility as performers. Plus numerous savagings of Cats.
Last night’s Saturday Night Live—the second episode of the new season—had no less than five stage-related routines, ranging from “very theatery” to “close enough.”
The host was Melissa McCarthy. I missed the first five minutes (caught them online today). Not having seen either the movie Bridesmaids or the TV series Mike & Molly, I didn’t know who she was when I tuned in. Turns out that before her TV and film fame, McCarthy honed her comedic talents onstage, in the Groundlings troupe.
Here’s the stagey line-up:
• McCarthy and Kristen Wiig doing a Fosse-esque dance routine, replete with sparkly black fedoras and bowties.
• One of those Andy Samberg SNL Digital Short videos that invariably bursts into song, about a savage battle between Stomp and The Blue Man Group.
• Rock’s Way, in which Chris Rock (Jay Pharaoh) is lampooned for having done Broadway. Even though he was in cutting-edge Stephen Adly Guirgis play, The Motherfucker in the Hat, SNL chooses to behave as if he’d been doing something embarrassingly commercial or uncharacteristic.

• A News Update segment about Andy Rooney leaving 60 minutes to do “a live-action version of Up,” with photoshop image of the curmudgeon dolled up as Ed Asner, holding a bunch of balloons.
• News Update again: A visit from Tyler Perry, highest-paid entertainer (who made his first fortune in live theater), impersonated by Kenan Thompson.
• McCarthy as a Mae West-like vaudeville star-turned film actress called Lulu, falling down stairs when trying to dramatize the line “Why don’t you come up there and see me sometime?” The sketch only seemed to exist in order to capitalize on Jason Sudeikis’ impersonation of American Movie Classics cable host Robert Osborne.

Airplane:

“What’s his problem?”

“That’s Lieutenant Hurwitz. Severe shellshock. Thinks he’s Ethel Merman.”

(The misspelling of Merman’s surname in the YouTube clip above is not my fault.)

Some Like It Hot: Features an actual vaudevillean, Joe E. Brown. Plus Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag. Plus Marilyn Monroe playing a ukulele. Of course it was made into a stage musical, and when Tony Curtis went into one of its regular downturns, he toured in it—in the Joe E. Brown role.

The Speed of Thought: Wallace Shawn in a supernatural thriller.

OMG! The Top 50 Incidents in WWE History: Pro wrestling tournaments are the medicine shows of our time.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop: The live show precipitated by the host having downtime between television talk shows.

The Man Who Cried: Before Sally Potter became a film director, she did dozens of dance and movement pieces as a performer and choreographer.

For Colored Girls: Considering the age and era of the original material, this is a surprisingly respectful film adaptation. Director Tyler Perry, of course, came up through live theater.

Deuces Wild: Dig this description: “It’s West Side Story minus the earnest balladeering when a war breaks out on the streets of Brooklyn, circa 1958.”

Exorcismus: All exorcism flicks are ritual theater.

Gotta Dance: Documentary about senior citizens become a hip-hop dance squad for the New Jersey nets.

Strange Powers: Documentary about Stephan Merritt: bandleader of Magnetic Fields, songwriter of the showtuney 69 Love Songs, contributor of original songs for the Series of Unfortunate Events audiobooks, co-creator of a musical theater trilogy with Chen Shi-zheng and composer of the Off Broadway musical based on Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

Karl Rove, I Love You: Actor Dan Butler sets up to mock the right-wing icon with a one-man stage show, but begins to respect Rove instead.

Discovering Hamlet: Doc about Derek Jacobi helming a stage production of Hamlet starring Kenneth Branagh—Jacobi’s first directing gig, passing the torch to Branagh just as he’s readying his own Henry V.

The Arbor: Conceptual documentary about a subject deserving of such a different approach, experimental playwright Andrea Dunbar. Filmmaker Clio Barnard has professional actors interpret scripted interviews with Dunbar’s family.

The Devil’s Muse: Yet another film based on the Black Dahlia murder. The victim, Elizabeth Short, was an actress.

Vibrations: James Marshall plays a musician who loses his hands in a car accident when on the brink off rock fame. Christina Applegate plays a computer artist who reinvents the handless performer as “Cyberstorm.”

Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason: Interviewees include Israeli playwright David Grossman and actor/playwright Will Power (The Seven).

Vereda Tropical: Manuel Puig, who wrote almost as many plays and screenplays as he did novels, is portrayed by Fabio Aste in this story about the writer’s move to Brazil from his native Buenos Aires to avoid persecution for his homosexuality.

From Russia With Love: The James Bond one with Lotte Lenya in it, brandishing a poison boot (not to mention this gun).

The Norman Conquests. 3-DVD set from Acorn Media.

The common labeling of Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon” isn’t entirely unfair. Both Ayckbourn and Simon are astoundingly prolific. I thought that Ayckbourn’s output had dropped off in the 21st century, but I find that he’s continued to premiere a new show every year. He also runs his own theater and directs regularly. Which puts in a whole other world than Neil Simon, who may have a Broadway venue named for him but who originally came out of television, and who did as much work in movies as he did on the stage, from the mid-‘60s onwards. Ayckbourn remains much more a man of the theater.

Yet Ayckbourn has had his TV and movie moments as well—happily for his American fans, who don’t have nearly the opportunity to follow his work that the British do. Late last year, Acorn Media released a 3-DVD set of the TV version of Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, broadcast on PBS in the 1977 and not seen since.

As with Neil Simon or Woody Allen, Ayckbourn gets his pick of top comedy acting talent for his film projects. This one stars Tom Conti, who was kind of the British Elliot Gould, in the title role of Norman, and features Good Neighbors sitcom co-stars Richard Briers (also renowned for Doctor in the House and other series) and Penelope Keith (also famed for To the Manor Born) in supporting role, with the estimable Penelope Wilton, Fiona Walker and David Troughton also on hand. They’re all meaty roles, since Conquests consists of three interlocking plays which play out virtually simultaneously and take place in different areas of a British country house. When a character walks through a door out of one scene, he’s often walking into a scene in a separate play.

Ayckbourn had great commercial and critical success with this maze-like gambit and used it again when he wrote House and Garden in 1999. (Where The Norman Conquests’ trilogy simply correspond to each other, and are generally performed on alternate nights with the same cast in the same theater, House and Garden’s two parts are actually designed to be performed at the same time, before two different audiences).

You can quibble about how well he accomplishes the multi-platform idea but dismissing it as a gimmick would be ridiculous. Being able to convincingly shift dramatic perspectives is an aspiration of all playwrights; it’s the basis of Greek choruses and Shakespearean soliloquies. Ayckbourn merely allows set designers and continuity-conscious dramaturgs and stage managers to be a part of that process.

You’re aware of the device, but not so much that it distracts from the characters or dialogue. You know that the playwright has set himself a writing challenge, and you don’t mind watching him work out this puzzle.

I only wish that, besides giving his blessing to the TV version (of which Penelope Keith is the only cast member who was in the original stage production), the Ayckbourn had directed it. Herbert Wise is an accomplished TV director —with two Derek Jacoby series on his resume, I Claudius and Cadfael—and is especially adept at directing his wife, Fiona Walker, who plays Ruth. But it’s a TV sensibility rather than a theater one, with conventional shot-reverse-shots and close-ups which confine a series of plays distinctive for their interactive openess. With The Norman Conquests so seldom done due to its threefold logistics, a “stagier” version would be much more instructive to theater jerks such as myself.
What we have here instead is simply an extremely entertaining comedy. Ayckbourn is bolder and bawdier than sitcoms. He makes fun of adultery, marriage, family needs and just about every other intimate social interaction. His characters range from the insanely self-involved to the utterly clueless. This is a colorful, breezy production with the added oomph of naughtier subject on par with American soap operas.
Where The Norman Conquests does get deliriously theatrical is in its characters outsized reactions to each other in scenes where they are hiding secrets or withholding opinions. They go into laughing fits, or get falling-down drunk. It’s also not a dated or simplistic series, not a TV show in play form. I have quite sharp memories of seeing it over 30 years ago—watching Ayckbourn for three nights in a row on public television was quite an event—and it holds up wonderfully.
Now somebody revive the plays already. They’re ripe for reinterpretation.

David Bowie—Starman

By Paul Trynka (Little, Brown/Hachette, 2011)

This is the first Bowie bio I’ve found that gives serious attention to the erstwhile David Jones’ stage- and film-acting projects alongside his musical ones.

The book devotes over six pages just to the BBC’s 1981 TV adaptation of Brecht’s Baal, in which Bowie starred. It’s revealed that before casting Bowie as the violent poet, director Alan Clarke and writer/translator John Willett considered Stephen Berkoff and Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries for the role. Bowie apparently captivated the creative team with his intuitive understanding of Weill’s songwriting, which he likened to plainsong, and his knowledge of the Neu Sachlickeit post-Expressionist art movement.

“Baal,” writes Trynka, “was destined to become a lost artifact, often discussed by Brecht scholars.Today, only the CD remains to document what was not only one of Bowie’s bravest artistic efforts but also his final Berlin project.” In an appendix to the biography, Tryka assesses all of Bowie’s recorded works and declares of the Baal soundtrack: “The blinkered view of Bowie’s career is that his last great album was Scary Monsters, yet this contract-filler—recorded in two rushed days in Berlin—is, in its own way, a masterpiece.”

The Jerry Lewis Telethon was the last bastion of a certain type of TV variety show which was wholly dependent on the mystique of live performance. The odd intros, the use of a large stage and a live audience, and especially the bookings were a welcome throwback to the Ed Sullivan Show, and to vaudeville before that. The show’s bookings leant towards performers with live stage experience: improv comics, stand-ups, ventriloquists, the casts of Broadway shows. Even the bands—country acts, Cheap Trick, Beatles tributes—were generally those who’d built up their reputations as concert attractions.

That wasn’t evident last night. The cameras came in so tight on the hosts that they might as well have been in a closed studio. The intros were perfunctory. Many of the music acts were reliant on backing studio tracks and may even have been lip synching. The old Lewis shows let acts roam free on the vast stage. Last night the performers were reined in.

So losing Jerry Lewis wasn’t all. And that was more than enough to lose. A manic marathon performer long before he entered the telethon game, when Lewis was still a double act with Dean Martin they’d do dozens of live sets a week. When the team broke up, Lewis became a breakneck filmmaker, filming his directorial debut The Bellboy in under a month at a hotel in Florida—while performing in the hotel’s nightclub every night! He was a high artist of the longform entertainment spectacle, whether as host of the 1959 Academy Awards telecast (for which Lewis had to vamp and vamp when the show ran short), in his jam-packed theater tours (just him and a big band) or in his decades as chairman and MC of the MDA show.

Outside of all-night strip clubs or the occasional Eugene O’Neill revival, there are simply no breeding grounds today which build that sort of entertainment stamina. And even when there were, Jerry Lewis stood out as one of the world’s best marathon funnymen.

Frequent shout-outs to the eminent Mr. Lewis, plus a video-clip finale in his honor, only demonstrated the vacuum now at the core of the MDA Telethon. Shortening the show from 20-plus hours was meaningless; it was boring from the get-go, too tightly composed and too earnest to be entertaining.

Nigel Lithgoe made much of having been “passed the torch” by being allowed to sit in Lewis’ chair when Lithgoe co-hosted the overnight shift at last year’s ‘thon. I remember Lithgoe making a big deal of it when it happened last year as well; was he being quietly groomed back then? Probably not—the chair was used by plenty of others, including Norm Crosby. ‘Twas not a throne.

MDA apparently raised a couple million more dollars than it did last year. But since much of that tally was simply acknowledging dollars which had been stuffed in boots and pledged on bits of supermarket cardboard for the entire year since last year’s telethon, that total is hardly a moratorium on Lewis’ service. It could be years before his absence is felt monetarily. Not so the broadcast, however—where were the jokes? The surprises? The bizarre intros and mispronunciations? The sycophantic check-handers, awed to be in Lewis’ presence? Without him on hand, watching the telethon was like watching Damn Yankees without the Devil, or a college without the Nutty Professor. Perhaps they had good cause to replace him (we still don’t know why he left), but they didn’t replace him; they just reenlisted his former sidekicks and sub-hosts.

Life-threatening illness has never been the main attraction. If they could just run that phone number and expect you to call in, they’d do it. There are a slew of reasons, whether selfless or self-serving, to do a telethon.

I direct you to this parody of a children’s primer, from the very first issue of Paul Krassner’s Realist magazine. It holds up just as well as Lewis did all those years.

http://www.ep.tc/realist/01/25.html

Snoopy! The Musical. There’s an animated version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but it pales next to the Off Broadway original, having cut half the songs so as to fit a one-hour TV broadcast slot and keeping with the Peanuts TV cartoon tradition of having the characters sound like real kids reading their lines off the page. (A few of the cast members here also appeared in the weekly Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show, during the most prolific period of Peanuts cartoons.) The singing is weak, the performances not as lively as in the classic Clark Gesner-scored stage version with its brilliantly modular set design.
Snoopy! The Musical, on the other hand, only benefits from trims and a consistent style. This long-gestating mutt of a sequel (the Annie Warbucks of its time) had its world premiere in San Francisco in 1975 but didn’t make it to Off Broadway until 1982, with a completely different cast. I saw a Boston try-out of that Off Broadway version, starring David Garrison as Snoopy and Vicki Lewis as Peppermint Patty—both far better than the material they were given to work with. (Lewis, years away from NewsRadio and other glories, was replaced by Lorna Luft shortly after the show went to New York. Some indignity, if that the biggest “name star” they could swing.) The TV rendition succeeds as a brisk, harmless installment in the long, uneven annals of animated Peanuts—more unwieldy than It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, perhaps, but not nearly as far-gone as the Spike-starring It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown.

Mayhem of the Music Meister! The final episode of the first season of Batman: The Brave and the Bold rated festival rated festival screenings and the release of its eight-song soundtrack, and was nominated for an Emmy. Neil Patrick Harris, still jut entering his mainstream acceptance as a Broadway belter (he’d done Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but had only just begun hosting all those awards shows). NPH accesses his old Cabaret and Assassins characterizations for a supervillain who mesmerizes the members of the Justice Leagure of America into doing kicklines against their will. The songs are super-catchy, from the style-parody “He Drives Us Bats” (sung by inmates of Arkham Asylum) to “Death Trap,” a suspense song which would work in just about any actual Frank Wildhorn musical.

Cats! It never actually got made (Really Useful Productions ultimately took the easy straight-to-video filmed-stage-show route instead), but the concept of turning Andrew Lloyd Webber’s leg-warmer into a ful-length animated feature was so appealing that it worked its way into the dialogue of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. Which almost made it real.

Shinbone Alley. This is the cat cartoon musical which did get made, against all odds, nearly 15 years after the stage musical on which it’s based had a short run on Broadway, and some 65 years after its lead characters had first been introduced as part of humorist Don Marquis’ daily column in the New York Sun. The film cleverly updates the urban squalor of the original archy & mehitabel newspaper adventures and the 1957 nusical to include the civil unrest and war-consciousness of the early 1970s, which connected it squarely to the Ralph Bakshi adult cartoon features Heavy Traffic and Coonskin released in that same enlightened era. (Bakshi referenced archy & mehitabel as slumdwelling urbanites in one of his films.)

South Park The Movie. Structured just like a real musical. The Book of Mormon’s success was inevitable.

Acorn Media has started its own sort of selective Netflix, a Britflix if you will. It’s actually called AcornTV.
Acorn is well known to theater geeks as the distributor of such stage-centric DVDs as Discovering Hamlet (reviewed here), the three-DVD television rendition of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests (which I’ve been meaning to review here for a while now, and will soon), John Gielgud’s Ages of Man series, Broadway’s Lost Treasures, Sondheim! The Birthday Concert, the box set of ten star-studded Gilbert & Sullivan TV presentations from the 1970s, the nonmusical Ray Winstone rendition of Sweeney Todd, a host of British drama series which happen to feature stage icons… If somehow you’re theater-savvy enough to read this blog and have somehow escaped the allure of Acorn, the “Performance” subset of their online catalogue is here.

The online streaming service, which will spotlight just a fraction of Acorn’s ample offerings, began last week. You can sign up now for a few weeks of free sample streaming. Starting in September it’ll be a paid subscription service costing $24.99 a year.

The service is concise: a programmed schedule of six series of “British mysteries and dramas” available online for six weeks each. The shows are staggered so that something new comes onto the sched every week. According to a press release, “There are six seasons and more than 40 hours of programming offered at any given time.”

This system of course favors TV series over other Acorn-affiliated shows. Perhaps some of those theatery specials and documentaries may get on yet.

But who’s complaining? I’ve already watched the first three 90-minute episodes of Foyle’s War, the lush and leisurely WW2 Sussex-set mystery series starring Michael Kitchen, famed RADA-schooled veteran of landmark productions of plays by Pinter and Stoppard.

I’ve found Acorn’s menu of shows manageable and inviting.
On the current streaming slate: the 12-part Brideshead Revisited (tup through July 31), six episodes of The Forsyte Saga (up through Aug. 7), three two-part installments in The Far Pavilions (through Aug. 14), nine adventures of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (through Aug. 21), the first season of Upstairs, Downstairs (through Aug. 28). Foyle’s War, with four long episodes available, is up through Sept. 4. Forthcoming in August: Wish Me Luck and Derek Jacobi’s Cadfael mysteries.

OK, he’s in his 80s and one of the most well-liked performers of the 20th century, a guy who always worked “clean” and endeared himself to such iconic iconoclastic artistic geniuses as Gower Champion, Carl Reiner and Walt Disney.

But Dick Van Dyke’s autobiography is so gosh-darn nice that it not only gets grating, it inspires you to sift for dirt between the lines.

For starters, this ain’t a Michael Caine or Dirk Bogarde tome, full of deeply wrought personal revelations and illuminating insights into the performing process. Nah, it’s closer to the namedropping anecdote anthologies of David Niven or Alan Alda, only lots lighter. Van Dykes’ few admitted regrets and confessions are transmitted on the same easygoing wavelength as the behind-the-scenes TV and movie gossip.

I like his various TV shows fine—Dick Van Dyke gets my eternal admiration for having Andy Kaufman as a writer and performer on the variety show Van Dyke and Company back in 1975 (two years before Kaufman’s own special Andy’s Funhouse and three years before Taxi), but could certainly have written a lot more about the show in his book. All his shows, for that matter.

There’s a whole chapter on Bye Bye Birdie, but it invites more questions than it answers. If it’s possible to downplay the importance of being granted the lead role in a Broadway show directed by Gower Champion, when one has only comedy-club experience and no dance training, Van Dyke downplays it. He makes his whole life out to be a chronic condition of being in the right place at the right time, hence the book’s title My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. After pages and pages of this good-natured aw-shuckness, you start to work an alternate version of Van Dyke’s life in your head. His understated admissions start to seem like cover-ups. For instance, Van Dyke was a regular churchgoer and self-styled theologian who even considered going into the ministry instead of becoming an actor. Yet when he was rebuffed for suggesting a multi-racial interdenominational religious gathering sometime in the 1970s, he quit organized religion altogether and says he hasn’t attended church since—even though the sort of Interfaith he sought has made enormous progress  in the last 30 or 40 years.

His ingratiating presence—he maintains that in most of his roles, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Diagnosis Murder, he was basically playing himself—seems to counter a highly addictive personality, considering his book’s frequent accounts of alcoholism and nicotine addiction treatments. He doesn’t paint a very dark side, but recounts numerous intensive yet failed attempts to quit smoking and drinking.

In his love life, Van Dyke depicts himself as a devoted spouse and parent. Yet after decades of marriage, he begins an affair (chaste, it seems, at first, but he admits that passion was involved and it felt adulterous) with a women famed for hooking up with big stars and whose lawsuit against Lee Marvin coined the term “palimony.” Dick Van Dyke divorces his wife, marries Michelle Triola, and lives with her, unmarried, for 35 years. His brother Jerry is apparently the one who takes care of the aging Van Dyke parents. Major setbacks in the lives of Dick’s children are minor points in the narrative, mostly inserted as time-markers.

The whole book has a white middlebrow “average American air.” When writing about campy queers like Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, Van Dyke will identify them chiefly through their uniqueness “(“No one has ever played the part like him”), which I recall from my own Midwestern upbringing used to be cultural code for “not normal.”

I’m definitely reading way too much into this, and I’m not even really passing judgement here—I think Van Dyke’s time with Triola sounds cool, and I respect anyone who can be such a big star for such a long time and still have such a glowing reputation. But this book is so squeaky clean it actually inspires you to crawl under rocks looking for dirt.

Anyhow, here’s my favorite anecdote from the whole book, which may give you a sense of how lightweight My Lucky Life is. It’s about the Broadway Bye Bye Birdie days:

I was especially fond of my understudy, Charles Nelson Reilly. I hadn’t met anyone quite like him, but I took to him instantly. He was hysterically funny, clever, quick, and intelligent. I was never bored around him. On the first night of previews, it was raining, and he came into my dressing room with a scarf around his head and purred, ‘Hello, my name is Eve Harrington. I’m such a fan of your work.’
He did the whole scene from All About Eve, which put me on the floor. He was one of a kind.