In 1966, the humor of MAD Magazine was molded and reshaped into an off-Broadway musical revue called The Mad Show. It played for quite some time in New York…871 performances, which would usually be enough for a small musical with a cast of five to turn a nice profit. Legend has it, however, that the show lost money and only ran as long as it did because of a serious cash infusion from the magazine's publisher, William M. Gaines. The story — and this doesn't sound like it's true but with Gaines, you never know — was that he'd bet a friend one hundred dollars that the show would run for a certain length of time. When it became apparent that it wouldn't, he spent tens of thousands of bucks to keep it running that long, just to win the hundred dollar bet.
There were other productions of the show after that, mostly in and around colleges, but it didn't have a long life. The only part of it that's ever performed these days — and not very often — is a song called "The Boy From…" which was a parody of the then-popular "The Girl from Ipanema." The spoof had lyrics credited to Esteban Ria Nido and music by Mary Rodgers, and it was and is no secret that "Esteban Ria Nido" is a rough translation of Stephen Sondheim's name into Spanish. Mr. Sondheim was then close with Ms. Rodgers, the daughter of Richard Rodgers and a fine composer in her own right. What they wrote is not much of a song but apparently, it was quite funny as delivered by Linda Lavin on stage. In any event, the Sondheim connection causes it to be heard on occasion, long after the rest of The Mad Show has been consigned to wherever they consign scores that no one does any longer.
Here, from some TV show in the eighties, we find Peggy Lee singing the deathless Ria Nido-Rodgers collaboration. One presumes that Ms. Lee was doing this voluntarily and not because anyone was holding a loved one hostage…but she doesn't look all that happy about singing it. By the way, the place the boy is from in "The Boy From…" is Tacarembo La Tumbe Del Fuego Santa Malipas Zacatecas La Junta Del Sol Y Cruz. Someone once remarked that Sondheim writes lyrics like a man who knows he'll never have to get up in public and perform his own material.
