Coming soon to a PBS station near you — but not too soon…

I've devoted a lot of this blog to telling folks about my pal Frank Ferrante's wonderful one-man-plus-a-pianist show, An Evening With Groucho, which he performs all over the world. What do I get for this? A lot of e-mails from people saying, "I saw your friend Frank and you were right about him!"

Not long ago, the show was captured for posterity and for PBS and I've seen the video. It was directed masterfully by Dreya Weber and it'll begin airing at various times on various stations but not until April. It's the next best thing to seeing it in person…which if you're anywhere near Sierra Madre, California, you can do March 4-6. He's also doing it in Philadelphia on March 12 and in other cities throughout the year. Check this page for more information.

My pal Vinnie Favale says it's Johnny Haymer in this very famous commercial and I think he's right.  I'm not sure why but I'm very pleased that everyone else in this world right now is talking about the Super Bowl…and we're here discussing the career of Johnny Haymer.  In this world, one needs to have priorities.

I assume that's not Mr. Haymer's singing voice but he does a neat job delivering his two lines…

Right after I posted the previous item, I got another ten e-mails saying it was Johnny Haymer and one from someone who thought it might have been Hamilton Camp. I knew Hamilton Camp and it wasn't him…though it wouldn't have surprised me if Hamilton could have equaled or even bettered what Howie Morris did.

Jay Thurber hit some online newspaper archives and found that The Philadelphia Inquirer, reviewing the show on Dec. 7, said it was Johnny Haymer. Meanwhile, The Vancouver, B.C. Sun on 12/5 called the actor "unidentified" and lamented the absence of Howard Morris. I lament the absence of Howard Morris every day since we lost him.

Jay also notes, "In the New York Daily News, Hedda Hopper was reporting that Howard Morris was writing a play about Sid Caesar, but wouldn't admit it — which is probably a big reason why Caesar didn't do the bit with Morris in the first place." Sid and Howie had a very strange on-again/off-again relationship. Each thought the other was utterly brilliant as a comic actor. Each found it financially advantageous to work together now and then.

But there was "bad blood" there now and then as well, a lot of it having to do with the division of whatever money was earned by the rerunning or reuse of material from Your Show of Shows and other programs they did together. Others who worked on those shows like Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks chose to not make an issue of it but they were very wealthy and also didn't have as many ex-wives (and therefore, alimony payments) as Howie. Howie also felt that Imogene Coca and some others involved in those shows were owed money and I have no idea how true that may have been.

Howie was nursing that play about Caesar for many years and when he and I became close friends in the mid-eighties, he asked me to collaborate with him and help him complete it. I declined and he eventually found someone else to help him. They did a staged reading of it at a little theater on Ventura Boulevard and it did not present a flattering portrait of "Eddie Romaine," as the Caesar-like character was called.

But sitting there, I thought it wasn't a bad play; just one that needed a lot of work, as most do after a first reading. It was though mistimed, as Howie soon heard that Neil Simon was writing a play that would be called Laughter on the 23rd Floor — his version of working for and with Sid Caesar. I think Howie then figured, "Well, what's the point now?" because I never heard him mention his play again.

And — oh, hey — I just got an e-mail from Rus Wornom telling me that last night, MeTV ran the episode of the original Star Trek series, "All Our Yesterdays" which included a role played by Johnny Haymer! I told you the guy worked all the time.

I have about 40 e-mails this morning from folks trying to identify the fellow in the sketch with Sid Caesar that I posted here last night. One person thinks it might be Gabe Dell. One person who has apparently never seen Sid Gould thinks it might be Sid Gould. And everyone else either thinks it might be Johnny Haymer or is absolutely certain and willing to bet their life that it's Johnny Haymer. So I'm going to go with Johnny Haymer.

Johnny Haymer (1920-1989) was one of those actors who worked all the time but never had that one signature part that makes him easily identifiable. If I said to you, "The guy who played Archie Bunker," you'd probably know I was talking about Carroll O'Connor. If I said to you, "The guy who played Mel Cooley," you'd probably go, "Oh, Richard Deacon!" But if Jamie Farr had never landed the role of Klinger on M*A*S*H, it would be difficult to tell you who I had in mind even though Jamie Farr was in dozens and dozens of TV shows and movies.

Johnny Haymer had a recurring role on M*A*S*H. He played Sgt. Zale (photo above), the supply sergeant who always seemed to be unwilling or unable to get whatever the unit needed. His movie credits included Annie Hall (where he played a bad comedian), Real Life and …And Justice for All — three of my favorite films. He also did voices for cartoons including The Transformers, G.I. Joe and a couple of shows I worked on but our paths never crossed.

The IMDB has a pretty long listing for him and it includes a 1959 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, though not the one with Sid Caesar. The Internet Broadway Database tells us he was also in the Broadway revue, New Faces of 1956 so it's likely he was in a lot of sketches in New York-based variety programs of the day. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on one of Mr. Caesar's shows now and then. In fact, he looks to have been pretty bi-coastal for a lot of his career with a lot of gigs in Los Angeles and a lot in New York.

Thanks to all who wrote in — including two more since I started writing this — to tell me it was Johnny Haymer. I think you're all correct.

One of the greatest variety shows of all time — some would say the greatest — was Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. And a lot of them would tell you that one of the funniest sketches on Your Show of Shows was the one about the German general…and they'd be wrong.

Not that it wasn't funny. It was hilarious. It just wasn't on Your Show of Shows, despite its inclusion on that "best of" film they released in 1973, Ten From Your Show of Shows. That series was replaced in 1954 by a new series called Caesar's Hour and the German general sketch was performed on that show. In fact, it was on the first episode of Caesar's Hour in September of 1954. Here it is as performed there by Sid Caesar and Howard Morris…

Funny, right? Well, any student of comedy might learn something from watching this next version of the sketch, performed December 3, 1961 on The Ed Sullivan Show by Mr. Caesar and an actor I can't identify. The gent, as you'll see, does a decent job but he's not Howie Morris…

I knew Howie pretty well and I remember him being pretty angry that Sid had done this but I never saw the Sullivan performance until recently. I don't recall if he was asked or not. This was about the time Howie moved out to Hollywood and made the movie Boys' Night Out with Kim Novak and began directing TV shows and doing cartoon voices. So he may not have been in New York when Sid wanted to do the sketch on Ed's show.

Nevertheless, decades later he was still angry that Sid did a sketch that, Howie claimed, the two of them largely wrote together…and which was obviously staged by having the new actor carefully study a kinescope of the original. It sure looked like they also showed it to the set designer for the Sullivan program and probably the wardrobe person and the director…and they even use the same music. Howie said he never was paid for it and was pretty sure the official writers of Caesar's Hour weren't paid either.

The second version is funny too but there's just something missing in it…and it's not just Howie Morris, though that's a large part of it. And does anyone have any idea who his replacement was? The guy looks familiar.

Frontier Airlines (which you fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights) is merging with Spirit Airlines (which you fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights) to create a new airline you can fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights.

Frontier and Spirit, the two largest ultra-low-cost domestic airlines, are merging. The $6.6 billion deal will create the U.S.'s fifth-largest airline. Apparently, there's some dispute about the name of the newly-formed company and I wonder if anyone's thought to just call it "Frontier Spirit." I could think of other names, of course…but none of them would be flattering.

The reviews of the new production of The Music Man should remind us of the perils of thinking any one review is the final word on whatever is being reviewed. They're all over the place ranging from headlines that say "Hugh Jackman's revival is a huge let-down" (here) to "Hugh Jackman Shines in Smashing Broadway Revival (here). And these reviewers may have been sitting only seats apart at the same performance.

This is something I had to explain to my father when I began writing for television. He'd read one bad review of something I worked on and if it was bad…well, that was that. The show was a disaster…never mind that others liked it. For him, ten positive reviews did not cancel out one negative and saying, "It's just one guy's opinion" didn't shake his feeling that the show was a career-killing disaster. There was this feeling that if the opinion was in a newspaper or magazine, it couldn't possibly be wrong. He certainly didn't feel that way about political opinions in some of those same outlets. But he did about entertainment product.

I suspect this production of The Music Man is pretty much critic-proof and there will not be a lot of empty seats at the Winter Garden Theatre as long as Hugh and Sutton are up there singing about trombones and White Knights. Reading the wide range of notices, it's interesting how to some, "old-fashioned" is a bad thing and to others, it's a plus. And what did the ones who don't like "old-fashioned" think they were going to see at a revival of a 1957 musical set in 1912? A lot of folks in their profession faulted the recent revival of Oklahoma! for not being old-fashioned enough.

If I were back there or traveling, the only thing that might keep me away from it would be the cost of getting good seats. Critics usually don't comment on that, perhaps because they all get in for free. But an awful lot of them were in agreement about that.

This time out, we have the theme from the TV series Hawaii Five-O — the original one, the one with Jack Lord — as performed by The Ventures, a band I always associated with songs about surfing. As I look over their discography, I don't see a lot of that but I think their sound — guitars, bass and drums — more or less defined surf music, a popular genre for about a year and a half, I think.

Their version of the Hawaii Five-O theme was so popular that a lot of people think they recorded it for the TV show. They didn't.  But here they are performing it on some TV show somewhere at some time.  I assume that four of the five guys playing are the four who made up the core of The Ventures: Bob Bogle, Nokie Edwards, Gerry McGee and Don Wilson. But they sometimes added a member or two for certain performances and here, they've added a second drummer…and it's Max Weinberg!

And hey, did you know the song has lyrics? Sammy Davis Jr. recorded them and here's a video that my pal Lee Goldberg once posted to YouTube. It's Sammy's record laid over video from a couple of different title sequences from the original TV series…

The Music Man with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster has finally opened on Broadway and that, of course, is no small accomplishment when you consider all the problems it had. The reviews, which are being aggregated on this page, are not as ecstatic as one might expect. Most so far seem to wish Mr. Jackman was a bit more treacherous, love almost everything Ms. Foster did, find the sets a bit odd, find the prices for good seats outrageous, say the show revels in its old-fashionedness, and endorse the sheer bankability of the project, no matter what the critics quibble over.

Not that I believe in believing all the critics but I am a bit less frustrated that I probably won't get back to New York to see this show, at least with its opening night cast. It'll probably remain a hot (and costly) ticket as long as Jackman and Foster are there. But it does sound a bit sanitized for our protection. Writing about "the show's treatment of men's casual harassment of women," New York Times critic Jesse Green noted…

You can't really remove it from the main story; Hill's modus operandi involves seducing piano teachers and leaving them flat. (At one point he refers to Marian as his "commission.") In light of that, it seems foolish merely to change a lyric here or there; in the dopey dance tune "Shipoopi," the couplet "the girl who's hard to get…but you can win her yet" has become suddenly enlightened as "the boy who's seen the light…to treat a woman right."

This gets us back to the question of whether a period-piece should reflect current values — an issue I wrestled with for the recent revival of My Fair Lady. I don't have a pat answer for that except that bad behavior should not be endorsed but we should also not pretend that it never existed. And I don't think that line in "Shipoopi" needed changing. Even in the most enlightened of times — which we have yet to reach — there will still be folks eager to mate, trying to win over the person with whom they wish to mate. That's not wrong. It's how one goes about it that might be wrong.

One of my pet political issues is health insurance and, in times of a worldwide pandemic, it's odd that I'm not mentioning it more. Almost no one is. Put simply, I think it will be a grand and glorious day for all — even folks who now view it as a horror to be avoided at all costs — when we have good, single-payer health care in this country. High on my list of reasons to distrust that Trump guy is that he promised many times that he had a much-better-than-Obamacare plan all ready to go…and that was a plain, naked lie.

Did you see any trace of it? I sure didn't.

Here's Paul Krugman talking about how the Biden Administration has done a good job undoing a lot of damage that Trump did to the Affordable Care Act. And warning what will happen if the Republicans take power.

Checking in at #34 — as Casey Kasem might have said and probably did — is "Spinning Wheel" by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. It was written by their lead vocalist David Clayton-Thomas and it hit the charts in 1968. I liked this song and thought it was interesting how often it turned up on variety shows performed by very mainstream artists. Some time in the seventies, I read an article where some critic who covered shows in Las Vegas cited it as the song he was the most sick of hearing in everyone's stage act.

The lyrics are full of drug references but it's like everyone loved the tune so much, they decided to just ignore that aspect of it. A lot of very popular songs of the day wound up being sorta laundered this way to the point where they even turned up on TV commercials. I have a vague memory that "Spinning Wheel" did for some product…maybe a casino or lottery.

As usual here, I link to a video of the song being performed somewhere. I could have picked several videos of Blood, Sweat and Tears performing it but I was intrigued by this one made by someone matching visuals to the record…with a special emphasis on the Wheel of Fortune game show and some very literal images…

While we're at it, here's the lovely Barbara Eden performing the song on a TV variety program. I posted this here once before and we had a big mystery about what show it appeared on. There were many guesses of either The Sonny & Cher Show or the series Sonny did without Cher, and my pal Mike Clark thought he recognized the camera work as being a Bob Hope Special. It turned out Mike was right. It was from a special Mr. Robert Hope did on March 18, 1970…

Here's what seems like a good "explainer" about what's going on with Russia and Ukraine. Like you, I have no idea what's going to happen there but someone — actually a lot of someones, plural — will be very unhappy.

My prediction for this year's Super Bowl is the same as it is every year even when I don't post it: I ain't watching. We all have things that interest others but do not interest us and I seem to be congenitally incapable of caring even the teensiest bit about football. I don't fault others for their love of the game. I just cannot join them in it.

Most years, I don't even know which teams are playing but you can't live in Los Angeles and not know the Rams are in it to win it. That means a lot of people in my city are going to be wildly exuberant or deeply depressed at the outcome. I do not understand that linkage. I was once in Times Square the moment the Yankees won the World Series and I have never seen so many human beings — a few of them even sober — be so happy. You'd think they had actually won something.

I am rooting for one thing to happen this Sunday…

My favorite pizzeria in town, Vito's, had a fire last Saturday evening. They're closed for they-don't-know-how-long and the timing could not be worse for two reasons. One is that it's a bad time for a great pizzeria in Los Angeles to be outta commission. For Super Bowl Sunday? With an L.A. team in the contest? I think they'd sell pies as fast as they could possibly make them. They could probably quadruple the price and still not be able to make as many as they could sell.

Secondly, the fire fighters were still there mopping up when Dave Portnoy — "the pizza guy" — happened to show up to tape a review. Dave misspeaks at first. Apart from the flashback, this all takes place at the Vito's on La Cienega Boulevard, which is the one I patronize. And Dave says "this place opened a week ago" which is misleading.

Vito has two locations — the one on La Cienega and one in Santa Monica. (He briefly opened one in downtown L.A. but that one seems to have closed.) The Vito's on La Cienega is the one that had the fire and it just moved from one space in a strip mall there (where it's been for years) to a larger space in the same strip mall.

Here is Dave's video of what he found when he showed up there. [CAUTION: Excessive use of the "f" word in the following…]

I don't know if they have a prayer of getting up and running again by Sunday but Vito is a great guy who makes a great pizza. It sure would make me feel good if they could pull it off. I wouldn't dare try to order this weekend but it would make me feel like I'd won something if others could.

Hope you've been enjoying Day #700 of my Coronavirus Life Style — staying home most of the time, going almost nowhere. If you'd told me 700 days ago it would last 700 days with no certain end-date in sight, I would have thought it would be way more unpleasant than it has been. But as I'm sure I've mentioned here more than once, it hasn't been that bad; not for a professional writer who'd be spending a pretty high percentage of those days at home without a worldwide pandemic.

Next week, the great state of California will be lifting the mask mandates in indoor public places for those who are fully-vaccinated. That doesn't mean much here in Los Angeles where the city mask mandate is still in place. The L.A. Times is guesstimating that that mandate could end in late March…

L.A. County is averaging about 9,500 cases a day, according to a Times analysis of state data. Case rates in the county are dropping in half every week, [Public Health Director Barbara] Ferrer said. If this pace continues, the county would fall under the goal of 730 cases a day in early March and could exit the indoor mask order two weeks later, according to a Times analysis.

I'm not sure if the end of such mandates will make me more likely to go to public places (because it's deemed safe) or less likely (because I'd be around mostly-unmasked people) but I don't have to decide that now. Planning that kind of thing in advance hasn't worked out so well for the last 700 days.

I'm getting e-mails and calls asking about WonderCon Anaheim, which takes place April 1-3. Its organizers are pressing ahead with an in-person (albeit sanitized for our protection) event. Details on badges, hotel reservations and other such matters should be on that website shortly. Am I going to be there? Again, I don't have to decide that now. Anaheim is in Orange County, which will have no mask mandate after next week.

Another appearance by Allan Sherman on The Ed Sullivan Show. This one's from February 20, 1966, shortly before he entered his "lose weight, grow your hair out and ditch the glasses" phase of trying to change his life and image…