I continue to be mightily impressed by the segment last Monday night on The Daily Show. I'm talking about the one with Nathan Lane, Tim Gunn, a bunch of street people and the cast of the Broadway show Jersey Boys urging Fox News's Sean Hannity to stay in New York and not move away. If you didn't see it, you can watch it here…
Even if you don't find its politics amusing, I hope you're impressed by the fact that they did it at all. Hannity made his statement on a radio show on Monday, January 20. If you were a writer on The Daily Show and you walked in on Tuesday morning, described the segment and said, "Let's shoot that and have in on the air next Monday," a rational Production Manager would have told you you were out of your ever-lovin' mind. Not humanly possible.
The scenes on the street with Lane, Gunn and various New Yorkers were not difficult…probably a very long one-day shoot for a good camera crew and producer. But the mind boggles at the problems involved in getting that musical number written, produced and shot. It would be beastly expensive to pay all those singers and on-stage musicians so you'd have to work out some special accommodations with Actors Equity, the Musicians' Union and SAG-Aftra. That's after you got the producers of the musical to agree and all the performers to say yes.
The end credits listed the song as by Matthew Loren Cohen and D.J. Javerbaum. Mr. Cohen is an L.A.-based specialist in improvisational music and David Javerbaum is a former head writer of The Daily Show. He's lately been writing for Broadway and has done a lot of special musical material for folks like Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert. They wrote the song and then I believe some band somewhere had to pre-record a music track because they probably couldn't use the musicians for Jersey Boys except as on-camera performers miming to the track.
So then when did they shoot the number? The cast of Jersey Boys does eight shows a week and to further complicate matters, Jersey Boys was undergoing a major cast change at the time. Dominic Scaglione Jr., who's been playing Frankie Valli, played his final performance on January 26 and his replacement, Joseph Leo Bwarie, returned to the role on the 28th. I'm not sure which gent, if either, is in the video but there were probably rehearsals going on at the same time. So the cast had to learn, rehearse and shoot the Daily Show song while that was occurring. That's after someone choreographed and staged the thing.
It looks to me like they had three cameras there, at least one of which was on a crane of some sort. Perhaps they got lucky and Jersey Boys was shooting something else that week but if The Daily Show had to bring in all that equipment and a crew, that could get expensive. Maybe someone involved in the process was so outraged at Hannity's position that they donated a lot of time and money.
I really thought it was quite funny and clever. The only thing wrong with it, of course, is that Sean Hannity probably loved it. He's made millions stoking the anger and paranoia of a certain segment of the population. It sure won't hurt him with that segment that he's such a potent voice for their side that the Evil Left is singing insults to him.