Monthly Archives: December 2008

The straight skinny from Bruce Vilanch, who is neither.

Hey, here's something you'll enjoy…if (big IF) you can hear it. BBC Radio 2 has broadcast a holiday concert of music from Disney movies. It's performed by a bevy of Broadway and West End stars, backed by a 70-piece orchestra, and hosted by Josh Groban, who closes the proceedings with an amazing rendition of "When You Wish Upon a Star."

The show runs about an hour and 45 minutes and can be heard at this link until January 2. That is, if you can get the Real Player interface to work, which is probably a 50-50 shot. Give it a try because if you can hear it, you'll probably enjoy it a lot.

Here's another commercial from the Jay Ward studio for Quisp and Quake, two breakfast foods that didn't taste all that different from one another. Paul Frees narrates, William Conrad is Quake, Daws Butler is Quisp and Bill Scott is the referee at the end.

In case you were disappointed that I didn't have anything to say about Eartha Kitt, here are two e-mails I've received in the last few hours. This first one's from Dave Sikula…

Just want to share my own Eartha memory. I saw the Broadway version of the Wild Party musical (there were two competing versions in New York at that time), and it was a pretty high-powered affair: Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, Marc Kudish, Tonya Pinkins, Norm Lewis. Collette was fabulous; one of the greatest performances I've ever seen (especially since the show itself was pretty dismal). But in Act Two, Kitt had an eleven o'clock number that blew everyone else off the stage. Even when not in that number, there was no doubt who was a Broadway star and who wasn't. You couldn't take your eyes off of her.

She was one of a kind and will be missed.

No disagreement. And here's James H. Burns with another memory of just how good she could be in front of an audience, big or small…

I saw Eartha Kitt in an Off-Broadway musical just a couple of years ago. At what must have been the age of seventy-eight, she was still absolutely sensational. But my favorite Eartha Kitt story goes back five years, when she helped a friend out, playing a key role in the presentation of a new musical.

This type of thing happens all the time, in New York: Full cast "readings" of what amounts to the first draft of a musical, hoping to make its way to Broadway. What's neat about these performances is often you see top notch Broadway performers acting/singing in these presentations.

But Eartha Kitt was a big star.

And what knocked out the folks presenting the musical reading was how nice, and professional she was, from first contact, through rehearsals.

And her performance?

With only a few hours of rehearsal, Kitt KNOCKED THE AUDIENCE OUT!

The other fun part of this brief tale, is that at a small party afterwards, a bunch of us were hanging out. Kitt still looked fantastic. And I say this in only the best, classic, gentlemen and ladies, version of this phrase —

She still knew how to flirt!

A wonderful performer, and certainly a fascinating woman.

Nothing to add except that I don't recall that I ever had the pleasure — and I'm sure it would have been one — of seeing Eartha Kitt perform in person. My loss…and I envy those of you who did.

The fine website Cartoon Brew has been featuring some excellent Christmas animations but they've left out my favorite short one. This was a promo done for CBS in 1966 by a great cartoonist named R.O. Blechman…

Every year around this time, a mess o' blogs link to my Mel Tormé article…and this morning, it's reprinted (slightly abridged but with my permission) in The Rocky Mountain News. So I might as well link to it here.

Dahlia Lithwick on how Dick Cheney is smugly confessing to all sorts of crimes for which he will never be prosecuted. One would like to think that the Obama administration is just waiting until the day when George W. Bush can no longer issue pardons…and then we'll start hearing about investigations of war crimes and profiteering. But I don't expect that to happen. The "rule of law" only gets enforced in Washington when someone wants to use it to get someone who's in power.

Over at The TV Time Machine, Jim Benson has a good interview with Lee Mendelson. It's all about the making of A Charlie Brown Christmas and other Peanuts specials that Lee produced.

As I mentioned yesterday, the great musician Page Cavanaugh has died. He was 86. Here's a little biographical video that was made for his 85th birthday. It'll give you a good idea who he was and why some of us loved what he did.

The L.A. Times has posted a review of that production of A Christmas Carol that I saw the other night. (In it, they link to what I wrote here.) They've also posted this report on audience reaction and anger.

Apparently, what I saw Monday night was officially considered a "preview" performance and last night was the actual opening. Based on what the Times reporter saw, it sounds like they got a few bugs out but nowhere near all of them. Putting aside the issue of advertising stars who aren't there, I don't think there's anything wrong with the production that couldn't be cured by about a week of dress and tech rehearsals…but of course, they're not doing that. They're doing the show, sometimes twice a day, for audiences paying full price and expecting a finished product. I hope some of them get one.

There's nothing in particular I want for Christmas but I especially don't want a set of Pez Dispensers that look like the original cast of Star Trek. And just in case they have them, I don't want a set of Pez Dispensers that look like any later cast of Star Trek, either. I'm getting the feeling no one else does, either. Yesterday, I saw the Shatner/Nimoy/et al set for sale in a Ralph's Market, marked down from $19.95 to $16.95.

I was once a casual collector of Pez Dispensers. Somewhere in this house, there's a box with about fifty of them and (probably) a lot of very stale candy. It was a childhood fetish but it was bolstered about fifteen years ago when I met a high executive of the Pez Company and he put me, for a glorious year, on the Pez comp list. I was already receiving freebees from most of the major comic book publishers but for twelve months there, I could go out to the mailbox every so often and find a crate of comics and a crate of Pez…the greatest fantasy of most nine-year-olds. You get your comics for nothin', get your Pez for free…

But at some point — about the time I would have had to start paying for them — I lost interest in collecting Pez Dispensers. I also lost my taste for the candy…and now, I've given up candy altogether so I may never Pez again. Which is a relief because otherwise, I might feel the need to own Pez Dispensers in the shape of Kirk, Spock, Uhura and the rest.

The one thing that interests me about these is that they're likenesses of real people. Back when I paid attention to such things, I recall the Pez Company had a firm policy of not making Pez Dispensers of actual humans. They had offers from a number of celebrities to be turned into Pez Dispensers for little or no money. They also had inquiries from wealthy folks who wanted to pay to have Pez Dispensers made of themselves. To all of these, they said no.

I see that in recent years, they've made dispensers of several TV and movie characters like this. Have they changed this policy or is the idea here that it's a Pez Dispenser of a fictional character, Captain Kirk, and not of William Shatner? On the other hand, given some of the things Shatner has done as himself, I'm not sure the distinction even matters…

As we've been noting here, the Screen Actors Guild is fast losing the momentum they'd need to mount an effective strike. Celebrity members are coming out in droves against that strategy and there's a bad fracture between the West Coast and East Coast wings of the union.

The latest development is that the announced strike vote has been postponed. It was to start January 2. Now, it's being delayed until after an emergency national board meeting on January 12-13. This will mostly consist of lower-ranked union leaders attacking their president, Alan Rosenberg, and SAG's national executive director, Doug Allen.

There's a good argument that these two men are not in the wrong; that the offer they've rejected is a bad one and not even the equal of what the WGA and DGA accepted. In many ways, this is exactly the time that SAG needs to take a stand in New Media and establish its right to a bigger share. If I were a SAG member, I think that's where I'd be…but I'd also recognize that developments, especially with the split with AFTRA and its acceptance of this deal, have undermined our position. It's near-impossible to imagine a scenario where all of SAG gets on the same page, links arms and takes a stance to demand something better.

So it all comes down to the big question: How does SAG get off this limb with a minimum of structural damage? The answer is probably going to involve dumping on Rosenberg and Allen, and installing co-negotiators (or just plain different ones) who can accept the deal that has been denounced as insufficient. This would be followed by all sorts of renovations on the SAG infrastructure, including a plan to do member outreach and to repair relations, to whatever extent is possible, with AFTRA.

But a strike sure doesn't look possible. If you were Management, how scared would you be of this union staging a mass walkout?

I've been eating Chef Boyardee products since I was a wee lad. Whenever I think of my Aunt Dot, I think of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Sauce with Meat. Darn near the only thing she could cook was to boil some Buitoni brand spaghetti and pour a can of the Chef's meat sauce over it. It was a pretty decent meal.

That sauce is apparently still made, even though I never see it in stores out here. A few years ago, I saw a store on the Internet where one could order it and I got a few cans, just to experience it again. It was still a pretty decent meal…not as good as the best pasta in my favorite Italian restaurants but I've had worse in places that allegedly whipped their sauce up from scratch.

In our clip today, you get a look at Hector Boiardi, who misspelled his own name and launched an empire. You may learn that, like me, you've been putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable when you pronounced his name.

In this commercial, he touts their packaged spaghetti dinner — an item which, like the corresponding product from the Kraft company, has kept an awful lot of people alive during times when they could barely afford groceries. Back in the sixties, there was some U.S. Congressman who wanted the government to buy tons of these packaged meals and to make them available free to any family below a certain poverty level. This never happened but I can think of dumber things our leaders have done to try and eliminate hunger.

How often did your Congressperson and Senators participate in 2008 votes? And how often did they vote their party's line? Here's a chart that will tell you.