Posted 2:53 PM by Gene

Do you have a movie or TV show or record you can't stop watching or listening to because it's so flat-out BAD? I have one: the cast album of TOMFOOLERY, the Gilligan's Island of revues. You've surely never heard of this album as it was last issued on LP in the UK nearly twenty years ago, and I only have it because DORSAL, er DORSET AUDIO (i.e., Barnes and Noble) created a homemade cassette right off the LP (literally), which I've unaccountably played hundreds of times. Then again this appears to be a favorite of college and community groups on infintessimal budgets, and pictures of these productions alone communicate how flat out BAD it is. Indeed this piece of junk has a special place in show-biz hell because it was one of the early successes of LORD SCHLOCKINTOSH, EMPEROR OF BAD THEATER. He decided it would be a great idea to anthologize Tom Lehrer on stage. And it would have been -- in 1965. The problem is age has not been kind to Prof. Lehrer's creations, as even THE GLIBERAL noted when he reviewed the New York production still in possession of his few small faculties. Consider this line from "Who's Next?":

We'll try to stay serene and calm --
When ALABAMA gets the bomb.

It was funny precisely because a megalomaniac like George Wallace would try to get the bomb to prevent integration in the South. But by 1980 the Confederacy was already turning into Mallopia with glutinous entrepreneurs and smiley faces, and so:

We'll try to stay serene and calm
When RONALD REAGAN gets the bomb.

Agree or disagree with its politics, it's not funny, and it's bitter. One imagines a highly conventional liberal like Prof. Lehrer scrunching his whole face, his whole BEING in mortal pain when writing that line. But the problem with topical humor is that it's topical. And that's not even the worst example; the future LORD had the BRILLIANT idea of putting "Wernher von Braun" into the show even though that notorious scientist had died three years before; one gets the sneaky suspicion that the future LORD and the Prof. had prolonged discussions about rewriting the song in the PAST TENSE. As is it sounds dangerously close to a TRIBUTE.

But then one may wonder about the ditties that didn't make it in. There is a terminal cuteness to them: was it worth three minutes snickering over the love life of Alma Mahler Werfel? Or Hubert Humphrey as vice-president? (That number is worthy of The CAPITOL STEPS and explains why Prof. Lehrer all but stopped writing songs in the mid-sixties.) Even the songs without topical references seem obvious. Really, do we have to be told that we grow old and die? And who cares about mathematicians? The future LORD surely realized what a BIND he was in with "The Old Dope Peddler," which must have struck even the Harvard students of the fifties as forced in its irony, but thanks to great advances in society he felt obliged to turn into a flat-out DIRGE. Happily he corrected the problem by introducing the Prof.'s VD song -- just before the AIDS crisis exploded. Great going, LORD!

And then there's "The Vatican Rag." On That Was the Year That Was the (probably inebriated) audience can't stop laughing. Here they can't START, despite the obvious presence of liquid refreshments (you can hear a glass smashing at one point), perhaps because Lehrer's nightmare had come true, as the Folk Song Army (unaccountably missing here) marched its way into the Catholic church, and as Lenny's MASS bludgeoned ears with its trendiness; but the nightmare wouldn't reach its true climax until the years following, with hackwork like Nunsense and Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? and jolly tap-dancing nuns -- no small thanks to Tom Lehrer.

Of course great songs demand a great production, and in this the future LORD SCHLOCKINTOSH did not leave TOMFOOLERY wanting. The cast of four sounds like a gaggle of League of Nations translators at a piano bar. It is especially amusing to hear someone sing "I Wanna Go Back to Dixie" with a Briton's idea of a Southern accent, which sounds unmistakably Cockney. (The guy got his training doing The Rocky Horror Show -- appropos indeed.) Perhaps recognizing how senescent the material is our troupers aren't content merely to sing it, no; they SHOUT it, and BANG it, over small-group arrangements that aim a big broad dirty thumb at your nose. ("So Long Mom"? How about "Taps" in the COUNTERPOINT?)

I'm sorry to have spent so much time on this, and I regret writing in this fashion, but once I laughed at Tom Lehrer, laughed hard. His recordings are still worth hearing because he had a sly Grouchovian way of singing, and he was equally sly at the piano. "The Hunting Song" must have a place so long as fools own guns. But TOMFOOLERY stands as Lehrer's last will and testament, and sadly, as his burial ground.

(New sentence in sixth graf, review link and spelling correction -- trouper for "trooper" -- added 3/6/2011)