What I watched: The eighteenth and final 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 Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Marge and Gower Champion. This episode was broadcast on 8:00 PM on Friday, June 3, 1949 on NBC.
Sadly, Mary McCarty doesn’t return for the series finale. I’m not sure if there was a falling-out or simply a scheduling conflict. Happily, her career continued on for many years, including appearances on other variety shows, so hopefully this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her more bitter and sardonic persona. Also, she may have been a lesbian? Her IMDb page lists no marriages and an actress who was her “close companion”, so you never know.
What happened: The finale is introduced as an “all-request” show, beginning with a musical number where people applaud and ask the dancers to do it again. Who asked for this? A dancing team named, I shit you not, Wholesome & Joy, briefly take the stage. They do some nice cartwheels.
In the first sketch, Sid Caesar is at the deli, struggling to find the cheque for the sandwich he ate. The clerk and his manager do not believe this, and promptly start berating him. A nervous Caesar promptly begins stammering as more deli employees stream into the room. The best bit is when a chef feels the customer’s stomach to figure out what he ate, with some accuracy. In the end Caesar produces the check, but finds himself in deeper trouble when he realizes he doesn’t have his wallet. Later in the show, Caesar does his usual movie-parody monologue, this time on the genre of boxing movies.
Imogene Coca and William Archibald do a comedic take on Nijinsky’s ballet The Afternoon of a Faun. Like Coca’s previous ballet parodies, the man mostly plays the role straight, while she makes goofy faces and gawks at his backside. A lot of the humour rests on Coca’s evident and quite un-ladylike desire for the faun. However, he can’t quite take the hint. Marge and Gower Champion also have a dance number, this one about meeting a girl at a party and being uncertain if she’s interested in you.
There are also repeats of sketches we’ve seen in previous episodes, including Caesar as a variety of foreign movie execs, Coca’s lounge-singer parody, the sketch with Coca as a hungover doctor, and the “freightyard ballet” number with the dancing hobos. At the end, Caesar comes out to give a heartfelt thanks to the entire crew of the show as well as the audience. In Broadway tradition, everyone comes out to take their final bows.
What I thought: “We’d like to bring a little bit of Broadway zoom right over the footlights and into your room.”
This was the promise of Admiral Broadway Revue: that it would provide a Broadway-like experience to the television viewer. Like most promises TV makes, it was one that was never possible to keep. For one thing, you watch a Broadway show in person, not on a small black-and-white screen. For another thing, part of the alleged magic of Broadway is that it’s a status symbol, particularly the new and acclaimed musicals. Most people go into these shows sight unseen, to say they had experienced Broadway. But most importantly, a successful Broadway show requires years of repetition, while television demands constant novelty. So the idea of offering a Broadway eventually faded into presenting a TV show, complete with recognizable recurring characters.
This episode, however, takes its cue from the theatre, and as such is very strange television. Repeating sketches makes sense given the lack of recording technology, and is standard in the theatre, but it’s hard to think of similar examples of a show where. It is interesting seeing how the performers add to and condense their previous work — for instance, Caesar’s movie-producer sketch seems a lot more involved than I remembered it being the first time. In later years, the actors would get to stay home as technology allowed for the time-honoured staple of re-runs and clip shows.
How to sum up Admiral Broadway Revue? I try to avoid fixating on the question of quality here, in part because it’s boring and in part because it’s ahistorical to judge an experimental show in 1949 with a polished comedy of 2018, especially for someone who has been steeped in the critical values of the twenty-first century. But I don’t think it’s a secret that, for me, the series outwore its welcome. Caesar and Coca are funny in a way that still translates, but it seems as if the show too often throws them out there without any idea other than killing time with their usual schtick.
For audiences of 1949, however, the Revue was great entertainment, and the novelty of seeing it in your living room or the neighbourhood tavern kept things fresh. Indeed, the series ultimately ended because it was too successful. Admiral sold out of television sets, and as a result had no need to spend money on the program. This was the downside of relying on a single sponsor: that a successful show could still get into trouble because of unrelated corporate needs. This final episode suggests that a second season will appear in September, but it never did. Instead, Liebman, Caesar and Coca would take their talents to _ and create the much better-remembered Your Show of Shows. I’m sure that, once we get to the fall of 1950, we’ll be able to see if that series lives up to its lofty reputation or is as much of a mixed bag as Admiral Broadway Revue.
…well, actually, we won’t. While over half of Admiral Brodway Revue is available in full-episode format, none of the longer-running Your Show of Shows is. There are various clips on YouTube, but for the sake of sanity I don’t write about clips. Presumably the YSS episodes are sitting in a vault somewhere, covered by the copyright protections that kick in starting at 1950. The result is that ironically the earlier, less polished and less famous show is much more accessible to contemporary audiences than the one that’s considered a classic of 50s television. Such are the vagaries of archiving under capitalism.
Well, maybe I’ll put together a post for Your Show of Shows at some point.. In the spirit of the theatre, sometimes you have to improvise.
And now, a word from our sponsor: A man in a white suit makes a show of “shutting down” his television showroom, and turns to show off other Admiral products, including refrigerators and radios. Caesar occasionally interrupts to add some humour, including a little bit of self-parody. As noted above, Admiral had few televisions to sell, so it’s understandable that they would be de-emphasized in the ad. I have to wonder if this was a regular segment normally cut from the YouTube version of the show — the salesman certainly acts as if the audience has seen him before.
Coming up next: Boris Karloff returns to Suspense!
The Eternal Couch Potato 