Haven’t posted my theater-themed comic strips finds in a while—so long, in fact, that I could break out a bunch of them under the common theme of dance and creative movement.

They are, in order: Cornered by Mike Baldwin, Brooke McEldowney’s enchanting serial strip 9 Chickweed Lane, conservative political cartoonist Jerry Holbert, two episodes from Paul Gilligan’s Pooch Cafe (riffing on Footloose), Millar & Hinds’ longrunning sports strip Tank McNamara, and Samson’s supremely smug and silly Dark Side of the Horse.

As ever, much credit is due to the two great comic strips sites gocomics.com and dailyink.com. I am a longterm subscriber to both, and suggest you subscribe too.

The Fatal Eggs

Through September 29 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566. Director/adapter/puppetry: Dustin Wills. Adapter: Ilya Khodosh. Producer: Melissa Zimmerman. Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard. Scenic Designers: Kate Noll, Carmen Martinez. Lighting Designer: Meredith Ries. Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme. Projection Designer: Solomon Weisbard. Co-Sound Designers: Joel Abbott, Matt Otto. Music Director: Dan Schlosberg. Technical Director (Ground): Nicole Bromley. Technical Director (Air): Dan Perez. Assistant Lighting Designer: Justin Bennett. Projections Advisor: Michael F. Bergmann. Printing Master: Ted Griffith. Performed by Chris Bannow (Professor Vladimir Ipatevich Persikov), Sophie von Haselberg (Pyotr Stepanovih Ivanov, Manya Faight, et alia), Dan O’Brien (Vlas, Pankrat, Watchman, et alia), Ceci Fernandez (Alfred Bronsky, Marya Stepanovich, Matryona, et alia), Michelle McGregor (Wdiow Drozdova, Dunya, et alia), Mamoudou Athie (Alexander Faight, Fat Man, et alia), Ilya Khodosh (Narrator), Gabe Levy (Voice on Radio).

There’s this wonderful phrase that the Yale Cabaret has been using on and off since the Becca Wolff regime of five years ago. To encourage experimentation and enhance the extracurricular aspects of the Cabaret, programs for the shows began to use asterisks to note members of the creative team who were taking roles or titles outside their specific academic field of study at the Yale School of Drama.

The phrase, as it is currently used in the program for the Cabaret’s 2012-13 season opener, The Fatal Eggs: “working outside discipline.”

And what a glorious term it is to describe The Fatal Eggs.

To do Russian comedy properly—and they do, they do—this show’s cast must do a lot of things which professional acting schools often frown upon—quick changes, cartoon voices, loud costumes, angular physical shtick, and the juggling of constant danger-elements like unwieldy props and wheeled furniture. The whole show seems exhilaratingly on the edge of collapse for the entire time it’s happening. The chaos perfectly conveys the story Bulgakov is telling.

The tale’s not exactly new—you could relate it everything from the myth of Icarus to the Kids in the Hall film Brain Candy. A scientist makes a breakthrough discovery which is instantly coopted by government, big business and the media, with catastrophic results. The art is in the telling. There’s a radical, riotous pacing to this cautionary tale that blends precise comic dialogue with anything-can-happen anxiety. It begins with screams and flusters of Grand Guignol intensity, then settles into confident vaudeville routines.

The writing matches the wackiness of the staging. Here are two scientists chatting about what to do with the remains of a lab experiment:

“Shall I bury it?”
“Defenestration seems more spirited.”

It helps a bit that Mikhail Bulgakov is working “outside discipline” as well. The Fatal Eggs is not one of the great writer’s playscripts but an adaptation of one of his short stories. This gives lots of dramaturgical wiggle room to the co-adapters, Dustin Wills (who directed the production and designed its chicken rod-puppets and other fabricated effects) and Ilya Khodosh (who goes “outside discipline” as the show’s onstage narrator, having memorized long tracts of exposition). Many Russian stage satires of this ilk get more and more frantic, to the point of madness and explosion. This one gives itself a chance to slow down. Once the terror of global biological upheaval sets in (frogs and snakes and chickens and ostriches are among the afflicted), The Fatal Eggs allows itself to catch its breath. It doesn’t stop being crazy-funny, but it allows for comic pauses and pensive-thought poses which would have stalled the frenzy of earlier scenes. Best of all, it lets you leave the theater having absorbed a message rather than just having taken a ride.

The actors mesh brilliantly with the staging and design. Everything has an old-school natural feel. Effects are old-school: puppets, overhead projectors, teetering piles of books and scientific devises and other crap. Similarly, the actors don’t “project” in the modern performance manner; they jut out, jab, fling and yelp like burlesque comics. This is established century-old Russian comic cabaret style, and the half-dozen main performers (covering dozens of roles, from servants to high government officials to honest country folk and scientist wizards) latch onto these surefire old comic techniques as if they were raised on them. Chris Bannow, as the scientist whose discovery sets the plot in frantic motion, admirably maintains a position in the center of the storm by being neither too kooky or too straightmanly. Ceci Fernandez and Mamoudou Athie stand out among the supporting ensemble for creating grand, showstoppingly hilarious, comic exaggerations out of parts which are largely there to fuel the plot.

Kodosh and Wills’ script helps the actors play big by revising Bulgakov’s story down to a few enclosed sets, and letting every single character get a big splashy entrance.

This is a finely tuned machine of mirth, menace and manic social satire. It’s a great way to start the Yale Cabaret season, and also a terrific transition from the similar (though less sensationally silly) Yale Summer Cabaret season of ensemble storytelling-themed shows.

When you scan the production credits above (for the record, Solomon Weisbard and Meredith Ries are also, like Khodosh, “outside discipline”), give special attention to the title Printing Master. I assume Ted Griffith is the guy who concocted the extraordinary fake Russian newspapers, whose tabloid headlines propel the plot as capably as does Khodosh’s narration (or, indeed, as does the late-in-play radio broadcasts stentoriously intoned with life-in-wartime aplomb by Gabe Levy). Off-stage, there’s also some print media to praise: I love how the program (presumably the work of this season’s graphic design team of Julia Novitch and Jessica Svendsen ) folds out into a little poster. I also dig the profusion of print—fliers, posters, photos and other epherema—which now adorn the Cabaret staircase as you stand in line at the box office.

This is a theater that truly respects text. And, odd as it seems in such a mad endeavor, honors discipline, inside and out and upside down.

New SNL cast member Cecily Strong (second from the left) as she appeared with the national touring company of Second City. The tour did a number of one-nighters in New England and had an extended run at the Long Wharf Theatre two summers ago.

Hey, the gossip sheets reported today that one of the newest members of the Saturday Night Live ensemble is Cecily Strong. She was with the Second City national touring company when it had an extended run at the Long Wharf Theatre in the summer of 2011.

I interviewed Ms. Strong for this very blogsite, right here.

The SNL season debut is this Saturday. Besides Cecily Strong, two other new cast members hail from Second City: Aidy Bryant and Tim Robinson.

Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s take.

I was firing up to write a post-modern theater explication of Clint Eastwood & Chair’s double-act at the Republican National Convention, but find that it’s been done very well already by lawsyl at Daily Kos, here.

Lawsyl took a cue from those who dubbed Eastwood’s antics “Theater of the Absurd.” But many viewers went in another theatrical direction, describing the bit as a “rambling, ad libbed vaudeville routine” (Celebuzz) or “vaudevillian like shtick” (CNN), “surreal vaudevillian routine” (Fiscal Times), “embarrassing vaudeville act” (Motherboard) and rambling monologue/forauy into vaudeville” (Gothamist).

“Reformed and Conservative” blogger Michael Bauman wrote:

Eastwood was just employing an old vaudeville tactic with his empty chair.  It’s been done exactly this way for many decades.  The tactic is vaudevillian, not leftist.

These protestations to the contrary, the vaudeville history books I most admire are not bursting with examples of empty-chair routines. There was indeed a popular routine in vaudeville called “The Vacant Chair,” but it was a sad song about a departed war veteran, not a comedy number.

There were many vaudeville routines with chairs, but they were done by jugglers and dancers. Burlesque striptease artists sure knew how to use chairs. The double-act Clark & McCullough had a bit where they moved furniture about and balanced a chair on a table. But to say that debating an empty chair is something we should obviously recognize as a classic comedy bit would be an overstatement. As Eastwood proved, the routine is simply too slow for vaudeville, too unstable, too ripe for heckling if the audience doesn’t share your views and tastes and timing.

Debating empty chairs, it is noted by Smithsonian Magazine and NPR and elsewhere, has a strong legacy in political debates. It appears that these convention-hall routines, some of which are very recent, are more common than comedy ones.

Comparing Clint Eastwood’s speech to a Bob Newhart or Shelly Berman bit, as the online comedy mag Shecky has done, is another forced comparison (though Shecky gets much credit for not buying into the concept that this is classic vaudeville). Berman’s prop was a phone, not a chair, and the antagonists answered—we just couldn’t hear them. In Newhart’s routines, the comedy was in what Newhart’s character was doing—his reactions, not the prompts from the unseen co-star.

Eastwood tried to imbue his chair with too much life and personality for it to be an effective comic act. You felt sorry for the chair. The chair’s response’s weren’t realistic. The chair deserved better.

Basically, Eastwood blew the only surefire punchline of empty-chair routines of any persuasion—that the invisible target has nothing to say, no response, just awkward silence. Eastwood had his chair responding with rancor to the snide accusations, essentially telling the actor and Mitt Romney to go fuck themselves.

What Eastwood did was create a character who was verbally assaulted, to the delight of onlookers, yet could only answer back with words put into his mouth. The effect was “You must be very angry that I’m so right, and so much in control”—not the surest comic premise, and not a great method of governance either.

Which returns us to Theater of the Absurd and post-modern performance techniques. Eastwood’s chair is the theater of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, in which a torture victim stands silently in his chair while being harangued by his business-like tormentors. It’s the theater of  radical monologists Eric Bogosian and Danny Hoch who encapsulated the fears and frustrations of the Reagan years, where well-meaning individuals are beat down by faceless bureaucracies and bigoted cultures.

I don’t think that, even if he tightened the act, Eastwood would play well in vaudeville. The jokes are too much like getting hit in the head with a chair.

The Yale Cabaret’s announced the first three shows of its 2012-13 school-year season. It’s the Cabaret’s 45^th season. The six other titles of the fall semester will be announced later on.

The Cabaret kicks off September 20-22 with an adaptation of Bulgakov’s sci-fi story The Fatal Eggs, scripted by Dustin Wills and Ilya Khodosh and directed by Wills  (whose previous Cabaret efforts include Basement Hades and Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend). The eggs are chicken eggs, but there are also snakes in this speculative satire of government, science and society.

The September 27-29 slot brings This., a new oral-history-styled piece “conceived and created by Margot Bordelon, Mary Laws and Alexandra Ripp. Bordelon  directed The Secret in the Wings for the just-ended Yale Summer Cabaret season. Ripp did the translation of Rey Planta at the Cabaret last fall, and Laws was part of the ensemble that presented the Cabaret rendition of Church. I know a little about this world premiere, since I was one of many people who was interviewed for it. The thesis is “a moment in your life when everything changed,” and it’s derived from anecdotes from a range of “Yale students, Cabaret patrons and other members of the New Haven community.” My own experience being interviewed was this is a thoughtful, introspective team that appreciates the value of the natural, heartfelt voice. Bordolon has some similar works on her resume, and reviews suggest that she brings a welcome creativity and abstraction to the table. So don’t expect just a lot of people sittin’ around talkin’.

Oct. 4-6: Ain’t Gonna Make It, another original work, this one more linear, and described thus: “Eric likes Tequila Sunrise and can make women sing in unexpected ways, but now he’s just trying to figure out why there’s an age limit to this “Make A Wish” thing.  Ain’t Gonna Make It is an unabashed exploration of what it means to know that you’re gonna die, fusing the chaotic revelry of a rock concert with the intimacy of theatrical storytelling.” The show is Conceived by Lauren Dubowski, Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, 
and Masha Tsimring. Dubowski was involved in last year’s Cabaret resurrection of The Yiddish King Lear. Dubowski is studying dramaturgy (and has been named Artistic Associate at the Yale Cabaret this season), Hussong is a design student (and Associate Artistic Director at the Cabaret), while Lewis is in the School of Drama directing program and was the assistant director for The Realistic Joneses at the Yale Rep last season.

The other Cabaret offerings of fall happen nearly every weekend through Dec. 8. The theater is dark on the weekends of Oct. 11-13, Nov. 1-3 and Nov. 22-24.

Artistic Director this year is Ethan Heard. Managing Director is Jonathan Wemette. Besides Hussong, Benjamin Fainstein is an Associate Artistic Director. The Associate Managing Director is Xaq Webb.

The company of Elm Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth in Edgerton Park, summer 2012. Photo by Mike Franzman, one of a vast and impressive album of Macbeth photos on Franzman’s Facebook site.

Macbeth

Through September 2 in Edgerton Park (Cliff St., along Whitney Ave., New Haven, traversing the Hamden border).

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Allyn Burrows. Set and Costume Designer/Wardrobe Supervisor: Elizabeth Bolster. Assistant Costume Design: Mike Floyd. Lighting Designer/Master Electrician: Jamie Burnett. Scenic Artist: Allison Jackson. Original Music/Soundscapes: Nathan Roberts. Sound Design Installation: Fred Santore (Horizon Sound). Sound Tech: Ivan (Horizon Sound). Lighting Design Installation: Luminous Environments LLC. Props Master: Kate Begley Baker. Fight Director: Ted Hewlett. Master Carpenter: Brandon Fuller.Production Stage Manager: Maria Cantin. Assistant Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo.

It’s a rare Macbeth that strikes you afterward as a mere walk in the park. This one has its grisly moments, making the most of the manners in which its supporting heroes and titular villain are dispatched. Yet those deaths, including a child, have an over-the-top, almost cartoonish quality to them.

Allyn Burrows’ production doesn’t seem nearly as dark as suspenseful as the last time Elm Shakespeare did Macbeth, about a decade ago. That previous production was directed by James Andreassi, who stars as Macbeth in this one. The Macbeth back then was Colin Lane, who serves as Macduff this year. The current director is Allyn Burrows, who will star as Macbeth himself when he stages the play later this year at the Actors Shakespeare Project in Boston.

Such a straightforward, realtively tame Macbeth stands out especially in a year when we experienced Eric Ting’s Macbeth 1969 at the Long Wharf, which reconstituted the text to suit a small cast and a stateside Viet Nam war nightmare concept. I was enthralled by Ting’s production, which subdued major speeches and brought to the fore some previously underappreciated textual flourishes. The Long Wharf show was also a technical powerhouse, with one grand special effect after another.

Elm Shakespeare, by contrast, doesn’t push the shocks and modern similarities and scary insanities. It’s a calculated piece of balanced entertainment which meets its audiences more than halfway.

I refuse to use the “T” word here— I don’t think Allyn Burrows is any more of a traditionalist than Eric Ting, and I reject the idea of a “traditional” or accepted way of doing Shakespeare. What tradition would we be talking about, anyhow? The half-millennium-old tradition? The 18^th century academic tradition? The 19^th century touring Shakespeare tradition, with ? The director-led “conceptual” tradition which consumes the entire 20^th century? Elm Shakespeare’s Macbeth takes a little from each of those. It’s accessible. It’s entertaining. It makes strong interpretative choices, including some very bold ones and some curious ones. Its spectacle is largely in the size of its cast, which has enough men in it to suggest an army and enough women to redress the gender imbalance of a drama overwhelmed by three witches and a conniving wife.

Those witches, by the way, seem to emerge from some demented Sex in the City sequel. The sisters are more stylish than weird, dishing rather than brewing. It’s an interesting take, since it emphasizes the social aspects of Macbeth’s fish-out-of-water status in his climb from soldier to ruler.

When shall we three meet again? Photo by Mike Franzman.

The imaginative set places the play in an ancient setting, replete with runic carvings on menhir-like stones. It’s more convincing than the one for Elm Shakespeare’s Macbeth of a decade ago, in that it nicely intertwines the trees of the park with the fortresses and platforms of the stage, setting you up neatly for all the nature-stoked elements and various witchy incursions. (The last one had the shifting of Birnam Wood represented by a SWAT-like team swooping in on ropes and pulleys.) It’s a contemplative production. Andreassi underplays “Tomorrow and tomorrow,” but from a position of prominence at the topmost tower of the multi-storey set.

There are capable actors throughout the thing, but the casting is more interesting as a repertory company exercise. Elm Shakespeare has so many stalwarts now that it’s fun to see Lane—a country bumpkin in Measure for Measure—grind his teeth as Macduff, or the legendary Alvin Epstein—of the first New York production of Waiting for Godot, the longrunning cabaret revue An Evening of Brecht and Weill and a founding Yale Rep company member—get given the comic Porter part rather than, say, the King or one of the other more authoritative roles he’s usually given.

In all, this is a return to the heady early days of Elm Shakespeare, less concerning with an even tone or a consistent concept than in letting some game actors have a go at a fave text. Because it’s Macbeth, with its showy monologues and blistering showdowns and frenetic fight scenes, it works just fine.

In the current issue of MOJO Magazine, the esteemed British pop/rock periodical, there’s an insightful, articulate interview with Kinks frontman Ray Davies. As is MOJO’s wont, the questions are far-ranging and not restricted to recent projects or other such grandstanding. Here’s one of them:

MOJO: Many documentaries on The Kinks fast-forward from Lola Vs. Powerman to Sleepwalker, missing out the band’s “theatrical” period in the mid-‘70s.

Davies: Yes, in this country, certainly. But during that Preservation era the band was really tight. I know The Kinks had a reputation of being unpredictable on-stage, but oddly enough, on the shows that had themes to them—Soap Opera, Schoolboys in Disgrace, Percy—the band was much tighter as they were playing to cues. There’s less space for improvisation., so it’s very tight.It showed a good evolution of a band that was born to make R&B evolving into making its own style of music.

And that’s about as far as that theatrical thread of the discussion goes, though it’s more than most writers have managed in the 40 years since that rock-operatic period of Ray Davies’ illustrious career flourished. A sidebar to the interview picks up some slack. Titled “Concept Yourself,” it purports to list “Ray’s best big projects. As chosen by [regular MOJO contributor] Pat Gilbert.” Gilbert notes The Kinks Are the Village Green Society (which he brands “The Bucolic One”), Arthur (“The Nostalgic One”) and Preservation Acts 1 & 2 (“The Audacious One”). In theatrical terms, they might just as easily be branded “The Bookless One” (since Village Green is plotless concept album about a fading image of old British style and culture), “The Nonstaged One” (Arthur, subtitled “Or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire”—and, I am obliged to add for the uninitiated, is wholly unrelated to the Dudley Moore or Russell Brand movies by that name—was intended as the score for a BBC-TV musical which was never televised, allowing The Who’s Tommy to snag honors as the first rock opera) and The Operatic One (the three-LP, two-act, multi-hour large-cast Preservation, of which the later album Schoolboys in Disgrace is a sequel).

Those albums had tours which dramatized some of the songs. Preservation was given its theatrical premiere by the Boston Rock Opera company in 1998. (The troupe specialized in adapting overtly theatrical rock albums for the stage, from The Pretty Things’ SF Sorrow to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies.)

MOJO chooses not to mention the most fully realized Ray Davies theater piece: the songs he wrote for a musical version of Around the World in Eighty Days which had a short run at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1988. Snoo Wilson scripted the adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel, Des McAnuff (who had not yet done his production of The Who’s Tommy, which went from La Jolla to Broadway in 1992) directed.

Luckily, there’s a whole chapter on that ill-fated endeavor in the fascinating book The Greatest Never Sold: Secrets of Legendary Lost Albums by

The only recording of the songs are as underproduced demos performed by Davies. “Those demos,” — exclaims, “represent some of Ray Davies’ most brilliant work since his ‘60s heyday. … How could an album of Ray Davies tunes about Victorian England and the decline and fall of the British Empire fail? It couldn’t, and these demos are proof; discovering them is a little like unearthing an ‘80s version of Arthur.” High praise. The show’s collaborators call Davies’ contributions “brilliant” and “fantastic.”

A recent MOJO mag, by the way, had a big feature on Van Dyke Parks, but barely mentioned HIS musical theater project, the Joel Chandler Harris adaptation Jump.

Let’s just pretend I announced back in early summer that I’d be having too much fun with family, and be too swamped with unexpected freelance gigs, to be giving this blog the attention I give it during the school year.

Allow me that bit of revisionism. And stayed tuned for daily postings, and new multi-media wrinkles, in the coming season.

I used to think that the official beverage of live theater was the dry martini. We stand corrected. It appears to be lemonade.

I recently ordered pink lemonade at the concessions booth of the Westport Country Playhouse and got a little juicebox of the stuff with WCP co-savior Paul Newman’s face emblazoned upon it. Newman’s own indeed.

Lemonade also figures heavily in the work of my vaudeville idols The Marx Brothers. In Duck Soup alone, Harpo & Chico terrorize a hapless lemonade vendor (Edgar Kennedy), while later Chico (at his trial for treason) answers an exasperated attorney’s announcement of “that’s the kind of testimony we can eliminate” with “That’s fine. I’ll have a nice cold glass o’ lemonade.”

Tonight (Sunday, August 12) at 7:30 p.m. in the Owenego Inn & Beach Club (40 Linden Ave., Branford), there’s another theatrical connection to the beloved summertime elixir.

The Lemonade Gang presents “Freshly Squeezed,” a showtunes revue of unusual variety. Songs from Book of Mormon, Smash, Aida, Jersey Boys, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening and Rent are promised amid some more standard standards.

The show has an air of spontaneity—the Lemonade Gang, led by Greg Nobile and Ryan Bloomquist and including a live band, has been at work since dawn today

The $10 suggested admission cost  benefits the Myelin Project, a foundation dedicated to finding a cure for diseases of the nervous system such as Adrenoleukodystrophy.

So, beyond its seasonally apt title, such a show is also a way to prepare yourself for the reliably showtune-friendly Muscular Dystrophy TV telethon on Labor Day Weekend.

Info at (203) 812-8682

In honor of Carousel, directed by Rob Ruggiero, at the Goodspeed Opera House.

(Previews began last month. Opening night was August 1.  The actress playing Julie Jordan changes this week. The show runs well into September. Don’t worry, you’ll get a review from me eventually.)

1.     The Sonics, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” This ‘60s garage-rock classic begins with singer Gerry Roslie yowl-crooning the opening lines of the Rodgers & Hammerstein song, then launching into a frantic rock song about night terrors and modern relationships:

“We used to walk together late at night
We’d stop and hold each other tight
You would tell me that you were afraid
I must protect thee. Here’s what I’d say:
Don’t, don’t, be afraid. Don’t, don’t, be afraid.

Don’t, don’t, be afraid, of the dark.

2.     Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon.

The erstwhile nutty professor, ladies’ man and bellboy would always end his on-air exercises in endurance with a tearful rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ advancing towards the camera, voice cracking, eking out those last few donations.

3.     Elvis Presley. He does it just as you’d expect, but context is everything. It’s included not on some songbook or showtune-themed album but on the gospel set Peace in the Valley, or as part of Amazing Grace—His Greatest Sacred Performances.

4.     Nina Simone. Largely instrumental piano version, in the inimitable Simone style.

5.     Gerry and the Pacemakers. Makes “Ferry Cross the Mersey” seem like heavy metal.

6.     Mahalia Jackson. Draaaaawwwws outtttt everrrrrryy woooooorrrddd until you forget what’s she’s singing about, and just luxuriate in the phrasing.

7.     Johnny Cash. Practically speaks it, not unlike Jerry Lewis.

8.     Conway Twitty. Does a much more countrified version than Johnny Cash, with backing chorus and Roy Orbison jitters.

9.     The Three Tenors. Living the lyric by not even singing it alone.

10. The Adicts. Punk hooligan rendition.

11. Aretha Franklin. Relish the irony of the woman who sang “Respect” channeling a tale of domestic abuse.

12. Frank Sinatra. Makes the song resemble “My Way” and “September Song,” somehow turning a song about bright fresh hopes into a nostalgic ballad.

13. Celtic Woman. Includes the halting violins associated with contemporary Irish pop music, but can’t resist a full swirling orchestra either.

14. Smoking Popes. Poppy, cleverly arranged, even suspenseful guitar-driven version, with a smokin’ solo.

15. Liverpool Football supporters. It’s the Gerry & the Pacemakers version this stadium full of soccer fans are referencing, their shouty accents giving the tune an eerie resonance: “Yooo’ll naiver wallk aloon…”

Bonus track: Can’t hear her singing it without thinking of her walking alongside the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion.