What I watched: The sixth episode of Admiral Broadway Review, a short-lived early variety series. The series was directed and written by Max Liebman, with a handful of other co-writers, including a young Mel Brooks. It starred Sid Ceasar, Imogene Coca, Mary McCarty and the husband-and-wife duo of Marge and Gower Champion. This episode was broadcast on 8:00 PM on March 4 simultaneously on NBC and DuMont, and can be seen on YouTube.
Mary McCarty was largely unknown heading before her appearance in this series — most of her prior appearances in iMDB end in “uncredited” or “bit part”. In 1948, she had something of a breakout role in a Broadway adaptation of Sleepy Hollow. Though the show itself was short-lived, her performance won a Theater World Award, and got her appearances in various musical revues. Television variety proved to be a boon to McCarty, where her dual talents in song and sardonic comedy made her very attractive.
“So, let me tell you about this fish dream.”
What happened: After the regular advertisement/opening, the opening musical number advises the viewer to “get off the beam”, meaning to resist the regimentation of life and be fun and spontaneous, much like this highly-choreographed dance routine. It might just be the video quality, but some of the women’s outfits here are rather suggestive. This is followed by a sketch where Sid Caesar plays a mob boss whose underlings encourage him to see a psychiatrist to deal with his stressful life. Essentially, it plays like a parody of The Sopranos that came 50 years too early. What this sketch does provide is an opportunity for jibes at orthodox Freudian talk therapy, with Caesar’s psychiatrist telling a patient that they’ve only begun to deal with her issues because, after all, she’s only been seeing him for six and a half years. This slow pace naturally doesn’t jibe with Caesar, who drags the doctor through a manic re-enactment of a heist.
Marge and Gower Champion apparently appeared on the cover of Time prior to this show, and that achievement is featured prominently in the introduction to their dance number. Perhaps because of their elevated status, they no longer have to act for a few minutes first, but instead launch right into a dance sequence based on “Three Blind Mice”. McCarty sings a parodic folk song, a deliberately atonal disaster which suggests that folk is a genre defined by a lack of melody and pretensions of rural poverty and authenticity. There’s also a fairly cavalier reference to mass murder here.
Perhaps the most puzzling part of the episode is a musical sequence that seems to be a semi-earnest ode to modern art. The number mostly serves as a vehicle for a performance by a female contortionist. I guess the strange shapes she puts her body into are supposed to be reminiscent of the distorted human figure in modern art? She’s actually pretty impressive, and a great example of the miscellaneous performers and pleasures that variety shows had room for. “Nonentities in the News” features the typical trio of comedic performers, with Coca as a woman who ran some sort of pyramid scheme and is constantly producing wads of cash from her person, McCarty as a sommelier who turns out to be more of a lush, and Sid Caesar as “Signor Ravioli”, an acclaimed pasta maker. The latter is mostly an excuse to do a goofy Italian accent, a hobby beloved by comedians of all time periods.
Imogene Coca performs a parody of the over-dramatic “arrangement singer”, whose pauses and strange choices completely destroy “Night and Day”. It’s funny, but it’s also the second intentionally bad song of the night. Gower Champion performs a song-and-dance routine from the persepective of a scorned man, with the startling refrain of “There’s no worse witch than a woman”. The film genre in the crosshairs for Sid Caesar’s monologue this week is the “Technicolor Western”. Caesar fires off a parodic Western plot and, in the process, gets rather worked up and sweaty. The concluding number is “Conflict”, in which representatives of classical music and modern jazz (the two types of music!) duke it out through song and dance. Both styles are represented by a man and a woman who compete by displaying their heterosexual passion.
What I thought: We sometimes receive an image of post-war America in which suburban conformity reigned unchallenged until the 1960s, when everyone suddenly rebelled. People who lived through those times, though, were not on average any less observant or self-reflexive than we were. The astute could see the changes going on in society, and the formation of Marcuse’s “organizational man”, and there were many who welcomed this change and others who resisted it through nascent countercultures like the beatniks. This episode of Admiral Broadway Revue draws on this societal tension to create somewhat incoherent comedy and dance.
The opening number would seem to be an ode to abandoning conformist life in favour of a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. To “get off the beam” means to abandon strict schedules and simply due whatever you find fun. This is, of course, a choice that was not available to everyone — but it’s also one that Admiral Broadway Revue doesn’t seem to grasp the full scope of. Getting off the beam is not exactly dropping out and dropping acid. It instead seems to be a mere change of attitude and vague free-spiritedness. It is best represented not through any kind of countercultural activity but by mainstream Broadway-style dancing, which is certainly “fun” but absolutely of a piece with the work-a-day world. The song calls us not to ignore the compulsion to work, but rather to pay attention to the other vital injunction of postwar capitalism: the compulsion to leisure. One must constantly be trying to have fun, preferably in ways that involve buying an Admiral appliance.
The limited horizon of this encouraged rebellion is reflected by Coca’s song mocking folk music. Working-class art, instead of being an example of off-the-bean lifestyle, is revealed as phony and laughable. Bourgeois and mass-market art, such as the Broadway musicals that the Revue slavishly imitates, is obviously what is really fun, and disdain for this type of art can only be described as affectation. The final number suggests a continuity between an established form of professional, bourgeois art and an emerging one, with no room for more amateurish styles such as folk. Had this program aired in the 1920s, they would likely have been mocking jazz as well.
None of this is to say that I expected Admiral Broadway Revue to be a font of culturo-political rebellion. What’s interesting is that they felt the need to endorse even a mild, vague form of cultural rebellion. Under late capitalism, everyone is a rebel for their cultural choices, no matter how banal. That stance seems to have begun at least a decade before I expected, with a little-watched early variety show displaying an early version of the pop-rebellion that now so dominates our society.
Up next: We get a break from Admiral Broadway Revue with an episode of… Howdy Doody? This is no break at all!
The Eternal Couch Potato 