Sinthea Starr (right) and her dear friend, the late Patricia Neal. Starr performs Saturday and Sunday at Lyric Hall in Westville. Photo courtesy of Bernie Kaufman.

“I first met Sinthea Starr aboard the Theatre Guild ship when Joy Behar was supposed to join us but got snowed in in New York. We had 25 minutes, but needed to get 55 ready, while sailing.
“Sinthea Starr had performed before, a single number. So I had seen her perform at that time. Since then, she’s done a limited run at the Metropolitan Room in New York.”

That’s Joel Vig, whose complicated relationship with a pouty diva resembles that of Barry Humphries and Dame Edna, or Lily Tomlin and Tommy Velour, describing his long and twisted times with the celebrated diva Sinthea Starr.

What does Sinthea Starr do, exactly? She sings a bit, and talks a lot, for about 80 minutes all told, with no intermission. Live piano accompaniment is provided by Chris Muller. “It’s like what Marlene Dietrich did late in life, that sort of autobiographical show, that style of monodeclamation,” Vig riffs.

Starr also dresses spectacularly. “She loves the classic Hollywood look,” her closest friend Vig dishes. “Her favorite designers would be people like Bob Mackie, William Ivey Long. I don’t know what she’ll be wearing in New haven. She’ll be coming there directly from doing an Italian film. She’s flying in early Saturday.” For Vig, it’s a mere train ride from his New York home base.

You can experience the Starr quality for yourself this weekend, when Ms. Starr overruns the lovely Lyric Hall theater on Whalley Ave. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood for four performances, Saturday and Sunday Sept. 24 & 25 at 5 & 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance—call (203) 361-8089—or $25 at the door.

Sinthea Starr’s Lyric Hall engagement came about after the event’s producer, Bernie Kaufman, saw the diva at a National Arts Club gala. Starr somehow stood out in the midst of a crowd that included Celeste Holm (whom Vig is hopeful will attend one of this weekend’s performances), Tammy Grimes, Gena Rowlands, Anne Jackson, Elizabeth Wilson (an old friend of Vig’s), Rosemary Harris and Anita Gillette—to name only the females there.

Vig (and Starr) have trod the boards in New Haven before. Vig directed a couple of dinner theater shows for Consiglio’s on Wooster Street, and has fond memories of attending try-out runs of Broadway shows at the Shubert Theater back in the ‘60s. He even worked as a technician on a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar which came to the Shubert decades ago.

Starr’s rising star is entwined with the careers of celebrities from the golden age of American stage and film. The Theatre Guild cruises, which the noted New York theater society started in the 1970s, gave fresh and interesting new work opportunities to a host of aging thespians. Vig and Starr became particularly close friends of a frequent Theatre Guild cruise voyager Patricia Neal, who died earlier last August. Vig helped Neal achieve the overdue honor of her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sinthea Starr has yet to get her own star, but she’s had brushes with plenty. It was while visiting the Edward Albee Theater Conference in Alaska with Neal in 2005 that Starr performed for that “Land of the Midnight Sun” state’s governor—no, not THAT one; we’re talking about Frank Murkowski, who served from 2002-2006. Starr does have a comment on Palin, however: “We wear the same size, but have slightly different tastes.”

Vig’s had fame on shore as well as at sea and in the icy 48th state. He was in the original cast of the Broadway musical Hairspray, nightly juggling the roles of the TV studio head, the high school principal, the dress shop owner, a security guard, and the flasher from the opening song. He also understudied several of the other roles. While he never had to go on as Edna Turnblad—both Harvey Feirstein and Michael McKean never missed a performance, he did play Wilbur Turnblad for a few weeks.

So Vig never got to wear the dress in Hairspray. He’ll be living vicariously, then, through Sinthea Starr’s antics this weekend.

I have a ukulele gig tonight (Thursday, Sept. 22) at the New Haven club Café Nine. I mention it because, as part of what I laughingly call my “act,” I perform a ukulele variation on the incantation speech from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Just the one scene so far, but I’m working on more.

My father performed Dr. Faustus with marionettes. I do it with a ukulele. That play can withstand anything.

Here’s a video I made of the bit a couple of years ago, when testing out a new Flip camera. Friendly note to those alarmed by facial imperfections: I will be wearing my fake front tooth for tonight’s performance.

Most of my other material is not as theatrical as the Faustus thing, though if theater freaks come and call out for “Comes Once in a Lifetime” from Subways Are For Sleeping, gosh, I’ll try to play it.

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

Not that I care nothing about Frank Sinatra, but the reason I got Lady Blues: My Life With Frank out of the library was that, before Barbara Ann Blakeley became Mrs. Frank Sinatra, she was Mrs. Zeppo Marx.
Few words are expended anywhere in print on the fourth, straight-man Marx brother. Zeppo left the act after their five Paramount films, never rated a biography, and never rated a biography. There are really only one Marx Brothers bios where Zeppo’s later life is given much ink at all; usually the historians limit themselves to Zeppo’s conduct during Groucho’s time with the controversial Erin Fleming. (Zeppo, countering his other siblings, supported Erin’s conservatorship of the ailing, smitten Groucho).
Barbara Sinatra’s book has pages of personal anecdotes about life with an aging Zeppo—how he behaved toward her son from her previous marriage, the extent of the fortune he’d gained from his manufacturing and inventing careers. (Other books downplay these lucrative pursuits, tending to mention his exploits as a Hollywood agent instead.) There are suggestions that Zeppo could be callous and shallow, but also many instances of his renowned sense of humor. (The more hyperbolic bios of the brothers trumpet that Zeppo was the funniest Marx offstage.) We experience Zeppo’s feelings at the death of his eldest brother, Chico. Since Barbara began seeing Frank Sinatra while still married to Zeppo, there’s a steady chronicle of how and why she and Zeppo drifted apart.
Of course, there are stories about the other Marxes. There’s a photo of the “future brothers-in-law” at Zeppo & Barbara’s engagement party. In the text, Groucho appears as foulmouthed as he does in Richard Anobile’s wonderful warts-and-all Marx Brothers Scrapbook. When, one Easter, Barbara introduces Groucho to a family with nine kids that Zeppo had out to lunch so that he could get the electric chord organ he’d decided to buy for Barbara as soon as possible, Groucho sauntered by, noticed the number of offspring, and commented “Been doing a lot of fucking, haven’t you?” Meanwhile, Harpo’s reputation as the sweetest of the Marxes is unruffled.

As a reader who came looking in Lady Blue Eyes for tidbits about stars other than Sinatra, I was further rewarded by an item where Barbara recalls working on a TV show with Ernie Kovacs—an opportunity she’d gotten through Zeppo. “Ernie was wearing a a huge false mustache, which I was supposed to find ticklish when I kissed him.”
Some of the reminiscing is supported by bad scholarship—Barbara (or her collaborator Wendy Holden) writes that Harpo’s “given name was Arthur,” when in fact it was Adolf and was later changed. But Barbara Sinatra doesn’t stint with her memories of her husbands before Frank. This is not a reference book but a dishy reminiscence, and as that it hits its Marx.

You can hear the BBC’s interview with Blee here; it’s not indexed on the BBC website as part of the program, since it was probably a very late add-on. It starts at six minutes and 17 seconds into the show and lasts just over three minutes. The Art Newspaper did its own piece on Blee’s Debate, here.

Besides analyzing the scenic design for this impromptu performance, the Front Row bit is also notable for host John Wilson’s referring to the assailant, Jonnie Marbles, as a “so-called comedian.” A lot of commenters on the various YouTube videos available of Marbles monologues don’t seem to appreciate his humor. But whether or not you like his politics, he’s doing lengthy, scripted humorous monologues, and I’d say that defines him as a comedian.
Huffington Post profiles Marbles, and embeds, some of his routines, here.

The news item sent me scurrying to the bookshelves, in two directions: to my film books, for studies of pie throwing in silent movies, and to my collection of radical lit which bring the satiric craft of pastry flinging into the modern era.

The funniest thing in the world is for one person to hit another with a pie. Crude as this may sound it has made more people laugh than any other situation in motion pictures. It was first discovered twelve years ago and has been a constant expedient ever since without, so far as be discovered, any diminution of appreciation. It has made millions laugh and tonight will make a hundred thousand more voice their appreciation in laryngeal outbursts. It is the one situation that can always be depended on. Other comic situations may fail, may lapse by the way, but the picture of a person placing a pie fairly and squarely on the unsuspecting face of another never fails to arouse an audience’s risibilities. But the situation has be led up to craftily. You can not open a scene with one person seizing a pie and hurling it into the face of an unsuspecting party and expect the audience to rise to the occasion; the scene has to be prepared for. There must be a plausible explanation of why one person should find it paramount to hurl a pie into another’s face. He must have been set on by the other—preferably by somebody larger than himself—and then suddenly the worm turns and sends the pie with unerring accuracy into the face of the astonished aggressor. To this an audience never fails to respond.
—From “The Five Funniest Things in the World,” Photoplay Magazine, September 1918. Anthologized in Photoplay Treasury (Bonanza Books, NY, 1972)

The “pie-in-the-face” prank has a lengthy history with manifestations in popular and folk culture. Like most pranks, pies are acts of ritualized inversion and humiliation. They draw on the power of laughter to unsettle and disrupt. Political pie-throwers carefully craft the symbolism in their pranks, something evident in both the enactment and in the subsequent discussion and documentation of the pie.
Any successful prank is a nuanced and well-crafted event, executed with strategic planning and with anticipated results. When combined with elements of parody and political wit, a prank can offer an entertaining act of social criticism. Pranks operate on and through power dynamics, inverting structures of status and convention. According to journalists V. Vale and Andrea Juno, a prank connotes “fun, laughter, jest, satire, lampooning, making a fool of someone”—all light-hearted activities. Thus do pranks camouflage the sting of deeper. More critical denotations, such as their direct challenge to all verbal and behavioral routines. They undermine the sovereign authority of words, language, visual images and social conventions in general. Regardless of the specific manifestation, a prank is always an evasion of reality. Pranks are the deadly enemy of reality. And “reality”—its description and limitation—has always been the supreme control trick used by a society to subdue the lust for freedom latent in its citizens.
—From “The Theory of Pie” by Audrey Vanderford, contained in Pie Any Means Necessary: The Biotic Brigade Cookbook (AK Press, 2004)

It’s well known that Stanley Kubrick intended to end Doctor Strangleove with a pie fight. The scene was even filmed.

Wendi Deng’s intervention adds a new staging innovation to the pie-throwing dynamic, that of the protective, involved third party. The humor is usually found in a disinterested interloper inadvertently getting in the way of a pie-throw, or trying to avoid getting involved but receiving overflow cream nonetheless.

But the most extraordinary aspect of Rupert Murdoch’s (nearly) getting hit with a pie was that it’s apparently never happened to him before. The BBB’s Pie Any Means Necessary book contains as authoritative a list of well-heeled real-life recipients of pies-in-face as has been compiled, and Murdoch’s not on it.

Jonnie Marbles has explained himself in an article for the Guardian: “I knew it was a tall order: a surreal act aimed at exposing a surreal process was never going to be an easy sell.”

Well, what’s he selling? Revolution, or pie?

1. Oliver!
2. The Point
3. Grease
4. Pippin
5. The Prison
6. Vince Fontaine in Grease
7. Television Parts
8. The Uncle Floyd Show
9. “To Be Or Not to Be.”
10. Bugsy Malone
11. Fagin.
12. Videoranch 3D
13. Broadway Micky

This also helps answer the question of whether, if you lock a bunch of Monkees in a room with typewriters, they’ll create Shakespeare.

The criticism seems rather harsh, considering that the performance brought Mr. Weatherbee to tears. And who among us wouldn’t wish to see Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper performing 19th century melodrama?