Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Steeple & The Showgirl

 

Note anything hanging below caption, upper right?

The Steeple

&

The Showgirl


by Jamie Jobb

Once upon a time – a mere half-century ago – I summered in Aspen, Colorado. Most folks “winter” there when the town becomes Skiers World Headquarters for much of transnational society’s roaming uppity crust. However, Aspen also hosts plentiful summer visitors who enjoy the challenge of high-country wilderness lands that surround the famous Rocky Mountain town. 

Heck, John Denver, the guy who wrote “Rocky Mountain High”, famously lived there as did the gonzo-rambling rolling-stone Hunter Thompson and the manic SNL straight-arrow-head Steve Martin. Not to mention boatloads of big-name billionaires, hedge funders, oilmen, developers, digital pioneers, pro sports owners and other upstanding oligarchs who maintain mansions and yachts elsewhere, but frequent their precious multi-million dollar second homes in the Rockies.

Itinerate non-celebrity workers like me couldn’t afford to live in Aspen itself, so we found rentals in nearby down-valley villages while earning our paychecks up-valley – a similar regional demographic also found in the clastic sedimentary economic striations of California’s luxurious Napa Valley.

Anyway, I was merely passing through Colorado, on the way to San Francisco after vacating The Deep South – and Florida in particular. I wanted an integrated world-view that Dixie’s crackerjacks could not afford to provide me. Little did I know my three months in Colorado would upend my back-woods world-view before I ever crossed California’s border.

The Aspen Times needed help with two chores which I could handle that summer. So The Times employed me as its primary photographer as well as its circulation manager, meaning I got to deliver fresh papers all over Pitkin County – to nearby towns of El Jebel, Carbondale, Basalt, Woody Creek, Snowmass – all the while taking photos along the glorious way. 

I was new to these mountains and it showed in my contact sheets.

Given the pokey economics of small-town American newspapers, my kind of personal job-share was not uncommon. Indeed, the paper’s entertainment/education editor was also the religion reporter. Her “beat” cast a wide swath around town. 

The Times’ part-time gig also allowed me on weekend camp trips to savor Colorado’s astonishing array of national parks and monuments, as most of these attractions were “near” Aspen’s central location within the state: Colorado National Monument, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Pikes Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Of course the photojournalism side of my job-share was most challenging, particularly with all sorts of famous folk passing through town. Since World War II, Aspen had been developing its summer reputation with its “Institute for Humanistic Studies” drawing world-wide brain-power for local lectures while Aspen Music Festival invited world-class virtuosos to play in its big white tent and the historic Wheeler Opera House hosted various famous live performers and filmed attractions. 

Indeed the place was a veritable Festival of The Humanities, which we seriously studied in college then, but now seems an alien concept to American youth who believe such study makes them like … totally unemployable!

I photographed visiting authors, musicians, artists and scientists, as well as anonymous road-flag girls, construction workers, switchboard operators, house-movers, al fresco ballet dancers, abandoned airplanes, abstract art installations, brass bands, parades, lost dogs, stray cats, tennis coaches and famous folks like India’s sitar master Ravi Shankar. 

Aspen is a peculiar high-profile slow-news small-town, with gig workers living elsewhere while most of its quaintly unaffordable Victorian streetscape sits semi-occupied by international jet-set big-wigs with more than one abode to attend. Residing in the middle of that cultural club sandwich were long-term landed-locals who’d been there a while and could afford to live in or around Aspen’s finery.

Which brings us back to the aforementioned entertainment/education/religion editor who had deep contacts in town, as we would expect. I can’t recall her name now, but I’ll never forget what happened after she assigned me to take a photo of American Theater Institute’s final production of the season – “Everyman: Aquarian” – at the newly-completed fully-ecumenical Aspen Chapel on Meadowood Drive just outside town. 

This was mid-August, 1970 – days before I’d leave town for good and never return.

* * *


With its tall imposing steeple, Aspen Chapel remains an iconic local landmark. It’s the building behind the actors in the above poorly-reproduced photocopy of The Times August 13, 1970 front page. The unedited version of the photo is printed below.  

As the theater event was a fundraiser for The Chapel, I assumed that the iconic steeple should figure prominently in the framing of the photo.  After I arrived we found a ladder and I began to arrange seven actors in poses below, around and on top of the Chapel. One young actor held a peacock feather and seemed most eager to pose for me as she was costumed in a brief floral bikini. She introduced herself and I got a sudden shock: she’s the daughter of the woman who assigned me to this photo shoot! 

Before I could say anything further, she quickly climbed up the ladder to pose herself in a dominate position next to the steeple on the roof – with her peacock feather sticking out as a “tail”. She seemed to have thought this through, her tail feather outlined in stunning profile as she certainly intended. 

I shot a roll of film and went back to The Times to develop it. On the way up to the darkroom, I told the entertainment/education/religion editor in passing: You’ll get a kick out of these photos of your daughter.” Little did I foresee the force of that “kick”.

I processed and dried the film, printed and dried a couple 8-by-10s and a contact sheet. When I returned to the newsroom, the editor had gone so I left the photos on her desk and returned to the darkroom to print other assignments for tomorrow’s paper as deadlines are deadlines. An hour or so later, the editor came upstairs to see me. 

She tossed the photos onto my desk. Her head was bowed over the image in front of us: her outrageous daughter standing out as some satanic penthouse vixen befouling a new local religious landmark. I expected she might be a little upset, but not THIS upset. 

We can’t print these pictures!” 

I said: Just crop her out.”

That was an obviously easy solution which would eliminate the daughter altogether from the photo as she was standing far above the other actors, including a guy on another ledge below her. I wouldn’t mind messing with my composition if it meant so much. 

The editor seemed to think cropping out her daughter was workable, although I realized later she didn’t fully understand what I meant. Clearly the photo’s value to any success the fundraiser might achieve outweighed her daughter’s obvious public dalliance. It was the main image on the front page, under a headline: “SPECIAL DRAMA READY”.

Drama-ready, indeed!  The editor had cropped the photo not in a straight line but in a crudely cut-out way that eliminated the daughter’s bikinied body, complete with tail-feather, but left her bare legs dangling mysteriously below the caption.  Anybody who looked closely would want to know about those UFLs – Unidentified Floating Legs!

This was my last week in Aspen before heading further West, but before I left town the editor called me into his office and told me his entertainment/education/religion editor had quit over the incident. It was such a shock to her civic standing and personal well-being that the embarrassment was simply too much for her to bear in public. 

So,” the editor said, pointing to her empty desk ... “do you want her job?”

While that offer seemed somewhat tempting in an obtusely ironic way, I told him I had commitments (albeit vague ones) in San Francisco and needed to leave Aspen, thank you very much.

As decades have distanced me from those brief summer months in Colorado and my solitary time as a day-to-day photojournalist, I imagine what I would have become if I had remained there – a bucolic worker in that bucolic land, hanging out with my gonzo pals Hunter and John and Steve. 

Of course, all I need do to evaporate that idea is recall the steeple and the showgirl which remind me that staying in Aspen was not a good idea for a guy like me who abandoned his own brand of gonzo back in Florida. 


Original unedited page one print

* * *

FURTHERMORE:

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

It's Garry Shandling

Limousine driver, big Cadillac car, 
rich and famous no matter who you are you are.
I seen a rock n roll rider, I seen a cinema star.
Won't you roll down the road, roll down the road, 
roll down the, roll down the road with me?”

                                                                                    -- James Taylor

Inside Joke: It’s Garry Shandling’s hair!


Hollywood’s Inside-Out Peepshow:

Studio Setups and Cheap Props


by Jamie Jobb

Magicians Penn and Teller make a living “showing the tell”, meaning they let us in on the trick while they’re doing it. But then they trick us again before we know it! That little peek backstage – the quick look “behind the trick” is a feint, it sets up the magic duo’s true trick, the one that matters. The one that “gets us going”. The one we can’t see coming: their punchline! 

Story magicians often work very much the same way. On stage and on screen, it’s called “tearing down the fourth wall” between the performers and the audience.

Perhaps that’s why so many tv viewers get hooked on these shows offering backstage peeks into the process of making actual programs like the very one we’re watching? 

Here’s a short list of such self-reflective shows in recent years on mainstream cable tv: “Episodes,” “Entourage,” “Fat Actress,” “The Comeback,” “Smash,” “Glee” (more on these shows below).  The hard scripts for these programs allow us backstage for glimpses into the lives of the performers, or rather the characters these performers play … as actual actors. It gets a little confusing, like a fun-house mirror. DIY celebrity-stalking without having to leave the sofa.

Perhaps that’s the primary appeal for many who watch these sitcoms? Who wouldn’t want an insider’s look, a view from the entourage: Save us a seat in the limo, bro!

If a show is called “Entourage”, we can bet the budget calls for a limousine. Which is exactly what we got in the pilot of that show. Along with the promise that we’ll be spending lots of backstage time with this group of guys prowling Hollywood.

But it takes more than just turning the camera around to show the studio crew for these shows to work. Much of the success of a program is based on how it’s narrated, if at all. Again that leads back to the writers’ room.

Setting a story in a large studio certainly makes it easier to shoot. Cast and crew are already assembled. Any part of the studio can make a suitable background, with little need for permits or traffic control or any of the other burdens of location shooting. Lights and cameras, normally left out of the shot, are necessarily included in camera angles for these shows because such background clearly indicates “working studio”.  Cheap and available props with enough hands to handle them, what more do we want? A bigger budget!?!

It’s The Garry Shandling Show

Garry Shandling “tore down the fourth wall” with “It’s the Garry Shandling Show” which was obviously shot in a tv studio with visible cameras before a live audience that participated to the point of “walking out on the show” in one episode. Garry had to go over to their “apartment” (the audience bleachers dressed to look like one big happy family, with lamps, wallpaper, wall photos and a door) to talk them into coming back home to the show! 

Himself a quite funny fellow, Shandling didn’t hide the fact that it was all a show – his tv show – because he was drawing on his inner Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs was keenly aware of the magical fact of television: Everything gets squeezed into a box (the tv) and pushed out through the frame (the screen). We could see Kovacs in a skit biting the tongue in his cheek because he had the audacity to do live routines.  

It’s the Garry Shandling Show” (1986-1990) was indeed a unique program created by head writers Shandling and Alan Zweibel, who covered their inability to write dialogue and exposition by making the show seem like a stand-up act with its opening monologue, odd theme song and co-stars to help Garry turn jokes into scenes. Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Al Jean, Mike Reiss and Ed Solomon also worked in that writers' room.

Shandling played a version of himself, a stand-up comic who lived in a Sherman Oaks condo and lived with a bunch of characters who understood they were part of his television program which had a visible active audience and lots of cameras, microphones and crew hanging around the condo. Kinda the obverse of “reality tv”! 

The cast was unique in that every actor seemed chosen for looks, all filling “next-door-neighbor” roles. None of them seemed to be stars or celebrities. Molly Cheek played Garry’s platonic mate, Nancy Bancroft. Pete Schumaker (Michael Tucci) was Garry’s best friend/neighbor and father of Grant Schumaker (Scott Nemes). Often stealing the show was Garry’s clueless mom Ruth Shandling (Barbara Cason). Just for fun Tom Petty played himself and happened to pop in usually at the right moments. In condos, everyone is a neighbor.

The show was full of mundane events turned extraordinary: Garry moves in and gets cable, Garry babysits Grant, Garry gives his Mom a surprise birthday party that almost kills her, Garry takes some Cub Scouts to a ball game, Mrs. Robinson hits on Garry who’s only interested in her daughter, Garry marries his maid so she can stay in the country, Garry chaperones Grant’s first date, Pete has an affair, Garry visits a psychic, Garry hosts a party, his ex-girlfriend comes back to town, Garry finds Lassie, Garry sets up his Mom with a doctor and Garry gets an acting job. And those were just “the plots” for the first season!

Anyone who appreciates absurdist humor should love this show. Fortunately every episode is now available on Netflix (see below).

The Larry Sanders Show

Not to be outdone by himself, Shandling followed up his first surreal sitcom with another backstage comedy, his award-winning “The Larry Sanders Show”, which was less absurd and more focused on characters than the previous “Shandling Show”. The backstage talk show was fast-paced and more acerbic. 

Larry Sanders (Shandling) is forever seeking support from his gonzo producer Arthur (Rip Torn) and/or his hapless sidekick Hank Kingsley (fantastic Jeffrey Tambor) as his office prepares for each night’s show and celebrity guests, who play themselves and wander in and out of scenes.

Again the strength of the show was in the writers' room. Co-creators Shandling and Dennis Klein were joined by Peter Tolan, Paul Simms, Maya Forbes, John Riggi and Judd Apatow as mainstays. Fittingly a lot of the dysfunctional action on “Larry Sanders” happened on the talk-show’s fictional writers' room! 

During its run (1992-1998), Larry Sanders Show fictional celebrity-guest slots were as coveted among celebrities as were actual talk show slots from Carson or Letterman.  It’s curious to note that although this program was about as “backstage” as you can get, characters were never winking at the camera to comment on the action as occurs in programs made during the “reality tv” era. “Larry Sanders” is a classic sendup of all things Hollywood, and it too has been collected for streaming (see below). 


Backstage trompe-l'Å“il at the Folies Bergère in Paris (photo by Brassai)

More Tinseltown Peepshows

Recent tv shows set in studios with ratings and links:

Episodes” (2011) A British-American production about a hit show called Pucks, an American-British production in Hollywood with Matt LeBlanc as himself (how can he not being great at that, huh!?!) He’s an actor stringing along his British writers Beverly (Tamsin Greig) and Shawn Lincoln (Stephen Mangan). Show is assisted greatly by solid support from three actors all playing utterly wacko Tinsletown nitwits: Kathleen Rose Perkins as Carol Rance, Chris Diamantopoulos as Castor Sotto, and John Pankow as Merc Lapidus. TV characters seldom get to be this nuts on camera

http://www.indiewire.com/article/how-matt-leblanc-episodes-got-us-one-more-season-of-friends-20150314

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Episodes/70175670?trkid=385063

Entourage” (2004-2011) Tales of actor Vincent Chase, a young indecisive Hollywood A-lister and his pushy childhood chums from Queens. Based on executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s experiences growing up in the same situation. 

http://www.hbo.com/entourage

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Entourage/70155583

Fat Actress” (2005) A short-lived poorly-named overwrought vanity project for Kirstie Alley as Brenda Hampton, an overweight washed up tv starlet and tabloid chopped liver who can no longer command the celebrity she once held. One Season, seven episodes.

http://www.avclub.com/article/dignity-always-dignity-case-file-21ifat-actressii--83473

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Fat-Actress/70172461

The Comeback” (2005) with Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish. A satirical look inside the entertainment industry, shot by a two-camera crew to create a doc-within-a-doc fake cinéma vérité.Cherish is washed-up star who created a reality tv show about herself offering hair-brained advice. Sometimes she wonders if she needs the attention.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/return-repressed

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Comeback/80027968?_=1438560000000&pn=1&retrkid=na&lnkce=mdp-clreviewp&lnkceData=1

Smash” (2012-2013) How could we miss if it if wouldn’t go away? But it did, after only two seasons. Megan Hilty is terrific as the Marilyn Monroe wannabe in this sendup of Broadway and Off Broadway. Solid cast and rare modern backstage look at theater in New York.

http://storyline-entertainment.com/smash-2012/

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Smash/70196148?trkid=222336

Glee” (2009-2015) No more New Directions, William McKinley High School’s glee club finally got kicked out of school this year after six seasons on the air.  No show ever kept “jumping the shark” so much as this one!

http://www.fox.com/glee

http://www.hulu.com/watch/767493

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Glee/70143843


Garry Shandling Links:


Ernie Kovacs Links:

https://www.shoutfactory.com/film/film-comedy/the-ernie-kovacs-collection

http://www.erniekovacs.com/bio.php


Movies Set On Sets


Some backstage filmset on sets:


Medium Cool

Fellini’s 8 ½

Day for Night

Contempt

Fanny & Alexander

The Bank Dick

Sunset Boulevard

Singin’ in the Rain

The Stand-In

Sullivan’s Travels

The Bad and The Beautiful

World’s Greatest Lover

Bowfinger

And God Spoke 

The Player

Postcards from the Edge

State and Main

Stardust Memories

Movie Crazy

Merton at the Movies

Make Me A Star

After the Fox



The Truman Show

Final Cut

Tootsie

Soap Dish

Lisbon Story

White Price Hollywood

Series Seven


Backstage films ofplays/musicals:

This So-Called Disaster

Bullets Over Broadway

Summer Stock

Stage Fright

Twentieth Century

Bombshell

To Be or Not To Be

Gold Diggers of 1933, 1935, 1937

Footlight Parade

42nd Street

Hi-De-Ho

The Duke is Tops

Stormy Weather




Monday, December 5, 2022

Shakespeare Backstage

 
Paul Gross (left) is artistic director who sees ghost of Stephen 
Ouimette in Canadian send-up of Shakespeare festival companies.
 

Slings and Arrows:

Canada’s Outrageous Fortune

By Jamie Jobb

Audients who witnessed Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” on stage came to a slow realization as each of us sat there watching those two bit players from “Hamlet” aimlessly flipping a coin while awaiting their next cue: “Heads or tails” … just passing time. 

Slowly we understood what confronted our eyes. We were situated exactly 180 degrees from another imagined audience watching “Hamlet” on another imagined stage of which we could only see the backside. What else are you looking at when you see two guys “waiting backstage” ... ON A STAGE!?!

Two sides of the same coin!” Stoppard wrote with deeply layered irony.

Such a stunning moment of Shakespearean theater totally turned inside out, Stoppard tricking us with his flippant peek into the dramatic clockwork that ticks behind every curtain we recall. And of course, behind every stage is a backstage …

Now, imagine Shakespeare turned inside out for television – by a fictional theater company dedicated to keeping The Bard alive in modern times. Imagine that program being an engaging, not-boring program at all. Imagine outstanding acting and superb writing, colliding storylines, moments to ponder. Imagine not wanting your show to end. And imagine each episode of the first season starting with this catchy little ditty:


Cheer up, Hamlet, chin up, Hamlet,
Buck up you melancholy Dane.”

So begins “Slings and Arrows”, a hilariously sad dramatic comedy from Canadian tv.  Clearly the creators of this monumental program are saying … Hey, it’s about time we poked some serious fun at Shakespeare!”  There’s nothing at all stuffed-shirt about this effort, although it’s quite serious in its well-intended good humor.

We know The Bard is in for a heavy shakedown at the end of the pilot episode when a major character gets run over by a lorry and turns into the show’s ghost! Let’s review the details: A series about acting starts when a Shakespearean actor gets drunk and ends up plastered recumbent in the middle of the road, only to be run over by a truck screaming in big letters the word “HAMS”. Printed right across its front.  Ham Actor Killed – news at eleven! 

This foreign-sounding English-language program premiered in November 2003 and ran for three seasons to achieve a kind of cult status among folks concerned with the history and future of theater.  It’s a bitter-sweet backstage office sitcom about a fictional dysfunctional Shakespearean theatre festival in New Burbage Canada (could that be Stratford, Ontario?) which is attempting to nurture its “declining subscriber base” by choosing an artistic direction somewhere between The Bard and The Great White Way.

Any writer who tackles Shakespeare has to be conditioned for all the hurdles of that difficult track. Exquisitely written by actors Susan Coyne, Mark McKinney and Bob Martin – each of whom plays a character in the series as well – this is their first writing collaboration together, quite an accomplishment. Every scene seems infused with deep insiders’ understanding of what it takes to live a life on the boards under the lights. “Slings and Arrows” is moody, uplifting, provocative, confusing, complex, bold, dark, dreamy and extremely well structured. 

Also note, these writers had a lot of fun with their character names, theatrically speaking of course: Ellen Fanshaw, Jack Crew, Holly Day, Oliver Welles. Clearly the program was cast with Shakespearean actors in mind. Seldom is one tv show stocked with this much acting talent. Let’s look at this remarkable cast:

Legendary thespian madman artistic director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross) sees ghosts, but also can fix toilets at his fated and obviously non-profit Theatre Sans Argent. Gross is stunning in the lead role, but can Tennant fix the festival mess at New Burbage?

Geoffrey’s on-again-off-again mate Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns) is his aging ever-apologetic leading lady. “Sorry for caring!” is indeed her sorrowful mantra. She seems done with the stage, although her lead roles are always there for her where Tennant is not.

Meanwhile Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) becomes the show’s ghost after the first episode. Yes: “Oliver (what a name for an artistic director!) Welles” is the Ham-Hit-By-The-Truck who becomes Tennant’s spirit advisor/mentor, after playing his living adversary for so long. 

Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney) is the company’s bean-counting thespian-wannabe general manager whose partner in marketing is the conniving Festival Board member Holly Day (terrific Jennifer Irwin). Together they plot to replace The Bard with more accessible fare, primarily musical comedies.

Kate McNab (an early role for now-famous Rachel McAdams) is a serious stage actor smitten by movie star Jack Crew (an early role for now-famous Luke Kirby) who’s been flown in fresh from Hollywood to play Hamlet, although the man has no actual experience with The Bard on the boards.

Darren Nichols (a brilliant Don McKellar) is the hilariously temperamental pointlessly flamboyant postmodern visiting director called in to save “Hamlet” while Anna Conroy (show co-creator Coyne) is an associate administrative director intern-Mom who falls in love with a visiting playwright named Lionel Train (Jonathan Crombie).  No foolin!

Each of the series’ three seasons is framed around a Shakespearean tragedy, which is featured as the play-within-the-tv-show for that season. Let’s look at these seasonal plot-lines:

Season One is framed around “Hamlet”. Or HAMlet, if we recall the first episode’s fatal truck accident. Tennant’s rag-tag company is broke and locked out of its theater with faulty plumbing. Oliver’s sudden demise allows Tennant to entertain his chance to run New Burbage’s festival, although Oliver will not leave this mortal coil quietly.  Meanwhile back at the office, Richard makes a power grab. Meanwhile back on stage, the community recalls Tennant’s nervous breakdown when he last played the Melancholy Dane. In rehearsal Tennant hands “Hamlet” helm to freewheeling Darren Nichols.  Kate skips rehearsal and takes a nooner with Jack Crew while Holly Day shags Richard to Toronto for some fact-finding R&R. Finally Jack screws up the courage to take his own crack at “Hamlet”. 

Season Two is framed around “Macbeth” with a “Romeo and Juliet” subplot.  As Richard points out the company is going broke, Tennant gets permanent post as New Burbage artistic director. Curses!!!  What will they produce? Mackers” AND The Fated Lovers!!! Christmas interns indicate a new festival frugality at New Burbage.  And “Frog Hammer” brings down a black rain of bad PR upon the theater.  “Romeo and Juliet” director breaks her neck, so show-dog Darren returns to direct The Fated Lovers.  Further fated Ellen and Tennant fail again at romance.  Subscribers cancel tickets en masse after alienating Frog Hammer PR campaign.  Ellen learns she has back tax trouble.  Macbeth gets recast and New Burbage gets rebranded in a youth-quake!  Richard’s “Gilbert and Sullivan” dream comes true.

Season Three concerns “King Lear”.  After a successful run of Mackers” on Broadway, the cast returns to Canada.  Ellen thinks of moving beyond New Burbage.  Darren is back in town to direct “East Hastings” a new youth musical.  Tennant casts legend Charles Kingman (William Hutt) as Lear despite the actor’s own failing mental cruelties.  Now with New Burbage in the black, Richard flexes his muscle as “Big Dick”.  Kingman causes more chaos in Lear rehearsal. Shakespearean strife spills over onto the musical.  At final Lear run-through, Kingman continues to blow his lines.  Big Dick pushes directors to swap stages, so the musical gets the larger audience and Lear doesn’t sink the season in the smaller house.  Ellen takes the tv gig.  Lear is forced to cancel, although Tennant – ever the showman – arouses one final performance. 

Seldom does television aspire to such wacky dramatic vision and achieve all that its potential permits.  Certainly “Slings and Arrows” starts with whip-crack writing and beat-perfect acting, but it carries over into the production values and the fluid editing.  Indeed, this is the tv show that told Hamlet to his own face: And by the way you sulky brat, the answer is TO BE!”  Any show that stands up to the classics like that, should get anyone’s top rating.


Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), Darren Nichols (Don McKellar) and 
Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney) fight for artistic direction

Cheer Up Hamlet”

Cheer up Hamlet” sung by Cyril (Graham Harley) and Frank (Michael Polley) at the start of each “Slings and Arrows” episode of season one actually is lifted from “the Blessed Herman Bonfire Songbook (page 66)”.  Here are the complete lyrics:


Cheer up, Hamlet, chin up, Hamlet,
Buck up you melancholy Dane.
So your Uncle is a cad who murdered 
Dad and married Mum,
That’s really no excuse to be as glum
as you’ve become.”

So wise up, Hamlet, rise up, Hamlet,
Perk up and sing a new refrain!
Your incessant monologising 
fills the castle with ennui
Your antic disposition 
is embarrassing to see,”

And by the way, you sulky brat, the
answer is TO BE!
You’re driving poor Ophelia insane!
So shut up! You rogue and peasant,
Grow up! It’s most unpleasant!
Cheer up you melancholy Dane.”

FURTHERMORE:


Watch all three seasons on line at Sundance Now (subscription):
https://www.sundancenow.com/series/watch/slings-and-arrows/c411f1fb190b2caf?season=1

For the DVD box set (three seasons of six 42-minute episodes):
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Slings-Arrows/70153368

IMBD page:

Another reverent irreverent look at Shakespeare, usually performed on stage:
http://www.reducedshakespeare.com/

A complete theater education on line:
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/