Stage & Screen Online

By Jeffrey Sweet

Here’s why musical fans the world over should be grateful to Sid Caesar:

In the 1950s, beginning with Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar starred in a series of TV programs. To write them, he hired the following people (among others) – Mel Brooks, Michael Stewart, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and Joe Stein. Not that it was his intention, but Caesar recruited and, by the nature of the comedy he asked them to write, helped train this gang to dominate the writing of books for musicals for decades.

Between them, alumni of Caesar’s writing stable helped write The Producers, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Hello, Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Little Me, Bye, Bye Birdie, Mack and Mabel, Take Me Along, and Fiddler on the Roof. (Woody Allen only wrote one musical, and it was for the movies, but do you think I was going to leave him off the list?)

I have a theory. Much of Caesar’s shows involved parodying the theatre, films, opera, ballet and TV of the time. In order to parody with real acuity, you have to know how the original works are built. So while these guys were taking apart From Here to Eternity, Pagliacci and This is Your Life, they were learning valuable lessons about why these things work that they later drew on when they started creating their own projects.

This thought comes to mind because the author of the books of Take Me Along and Fiddler, the afore-mentioned Joe Stein, is being celebrated at the York Theatre [http://www.yorktheatre.org/] in a month-long series of staged readings of four of his other shows – Zorba, Enter Laughing, The Body Beautiful and The Baker’s Wife. Sunday, I saw Enter Laughing, which is based on his play of the same name, which in turn was based on the novel of the same name by fellow Caesar alumnus, Carl Reiner.

Enter Laughing belongs to the subset of projects created by Caesar’s writers about Jewish boys and show business. Whereas Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the Mel Brooks-produced film, My Favorite Year (which also became a musical) and the sitcom Carl Reiner created and co-starred in, The Dick Van Dyke Show, were all openly fictionalized versions of being on Caesar’s staff, Enter Laughing dramatizes an earlier stage. Its young hero, David, yearns to break free from the bonds of cautious family life, resist his destiny as a pharmacist and try his luck as (horrors) an actor.

Josh Grisetti was young David, his parents were played by the married lawyers from L.A. Law (and real-life married couple), Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, Kaitlin Hopkins was a man-hungry actress and George S. Irving was her weary actor-manager father. Irving, in fact, had played this part on Broadway when the show was a flop under the title, Farewell 174th Street. One of the reasons it was a flop was that the young David was played by 45-year-old Robert Morse. To justify Morse playing a teenager, the producers persuaded Stein to frame it as a flashback. The critics at the time weren’t buying it, and sadly the show didn’t last long.

Director Stuart Ross proved it deserves better. Is it a missing masterpiece? Well, no, but it is funny and tuneful and it contains a pricelessly vulgar song in which David imagines he’s a movie star with a butler (played with great hauteur by Mr. Irving) who fears the master can’t respond to a call from Greta Garbo because he’s busy providing carnal entertainment to a long list of Thirties movie stars. (In a talk with the audience after the performance, young Grisetti confessed he hadn’t heard of most of them. Happily, enough of the audience were familiar with the references to stop the show. But then how can any song that invokes Anna Mae Wong not have a laugh or two?)

The proceedings were introduced, as ever, by the York’s artistic director, Jim Morgan. A few days earlier, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed in a talk at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Jim suggested that might be why there are no great Iranian musical comedies.

There’s also no evidence that Sid Caesar ever visited Iran.

(c) Jeffrey Sweet 2007
Jeffrey Sweet is a playwright, journalist and teacher, probably best known for his play THE VALUE OF NAMES, the musical WHAT ABOUT LUV? (which played the Orange Tree many years ago), and a history of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY.  A resident artist at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre, nine of his plays will soon appear in anthology published by Northwestern University Press.