What I watched: The twelfth episode of Admiral Broadway Revue 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 McCarthy and the husband-and-wife duo of Marge and Gower Champion. This episode was broadcast on 8:00 PM on Friday, April 15, 1949 simultaneously on NBC and DuMont. It is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: The opening dance number celebrates spring sunshine and features dancers in very old-fashioned costumes. It seems like something out of Gay 90s Review — even the backdrop looks Victorian. It seems like an odd move to celebrate the sunshine of a month known for its rain but hey, I’ve never run a revue, so what do I know? This cuts to Marilyn Day singing a more contemporary-sounding number, “The Boogie-Woogie Minuet.” Hey, I didn’t say it was high art. There is some nice tap-dancing.
The evening’s first sketch involves Sid Caesar robbing a high-priced haberdashery, and stuffing the effete Frenchman who runs it into a closet. He then has to deal with the merchant’s visitors, including a clueless cop, a high-strung Coca. At one point Caesar and Coca have to look for a red hat, which is a little awkward on a black-and-white show. Mary McCarthy then takes us on a tour of an “imaginary nightclub”, with her imitating the various types of nightclub singers — which, if you wondered, were heartsick, fights-with-the-pianist, sits-on-the-piano, and the jaded vet.
Coca and James Starbuck perform a “mutilated” version of Swan Lake, apparently a springtime classic. Coca sheds swan feathers all over the stage. There’s a half-second, probably unintentional blowjob joke. For the most part it’s just silly dancing. The number concludes with Coca being suspended above the stage, and immediately struggling and panicking. Marilyn Day gets another number where she portrays a starstruck young woman mooning over Gene Kelly. Who can’t relate to that? Even getting almost run over by Kelly in person isn’t enough to deter the obsessed Day.
Johnny Mack performs a tap-dance number, which is followed by the return of “Nonentities in the News”. The nonentities are Coca as fanciful taxi driver “Amelia Gearshift”, McCarthy as “Miss Perennial” and the plants growing out of her pockets, and Caesar as window-washer “Pete Squeegee.” Great names all. Marge and Gower Champion perform a picnic-themed dance in front of a farm backdrop to celebrate the coming of spring. Sid Caesar gives his monologue, a swing reinterpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac. This is really above my head, but the song is fun. Caesar even plays sax! We then get a fairly solemn musical number, complete with chorus, that salutes the “pioneer spirit of America.” People in clothes from prior centuries open their arms and, as Sheryl Crow would say, soak up the sun.
What I thought: The Revue’s creative wells are starting to run a bit dry. There’s a lot of stuff in here we’ve seen before — Caesar pretending to be French, McCarthy pretending to be a bad nightclub singer. The downside of running a show every week is that you run through everyone’s repertoire pretty quick. The upside is that you can do it quicker and smoother each time, and in terms of production this might be the most efficient episode to date, with several strikingly quick set changes. Even the wire suspension in the Swan Lake parody is done without a fuss. And hey, we have “Nonentities in the News”, which always seems to find the Revue’s comedic actors at their best.
Marilyn Day gets quite a bit more room to shine here than other guest stars, with two solo segments. She’s reasonably charming, and does a youthful, cheery character better than Coca or McCarthy probably could, at the expense of being a little grating. Her prominence is something of a mystery. Did Liebman see her as a future star? If so, it didn’t pan out. This was Day’s only episode of the Revue, and she has only two television credits after this. Maybe the show was simply desperate to get a fresh face and some new material on screen. In any case, I’m glad Day didn’t become a regular. I have a hard enough time telling two dark-haired funnywomen apart.
Easter seems to be a bigger deal in this era — it’s the subject of numerous sketches, and at one point McCarthy refers to it as “the holiday season”. These days it might be a premise for a single sketch on a show like this, but probably not. Not being religious, Easter is nothing more than a long weekend for me, and I’d wager the same is true for a lot of people today. However, the predominance of Easter in both this and last week’s episodes suggests how the more religious (and specifically Christian) society of the 1940s affects even a thoroughly secular comedy show starring and created by Jews.
The spiritual significance of Christianity gets oddly transmuted into the mythical space of the American pastoral in the final sequence. A choral group sings what sounds a lot like hymns, but actually contain English words about the upcoming song. It’s certainly more serious and ambitious than the typical closing numbers, although unsuccessful in its own way. Perhaps this was Liebman’s attempt to take the aesthetic glories of the holiday and restore them to the secular celebration of the coming of spring. The choice to dress everyone in pioneer garb suggests that Easter, like Thanksgiving, should be a celebration of the settling of America, which like the dawn of spring here is presented as the emergence of warmth into a desolate world. (This is not at all how history actually went, but rather American mythology.) The song has a lot of religious and cultural resonance, but throughout it I just wanted Sid Caesar to play the sax again.
Coming up next: Morey Amsterdam enters the variety game with mixed results.
The Eternal Couch Potato 