On the 'vulgarization' of Genet's 'The Maids'

Isabelle Huppert can do wrong. Well, she can appear (and has) in films that aren't quite up to her standard of quality from time to time, but even in those she has given nuanced, detailed performances, making the films at least worth checking out, if not remembering. The notion of her performing in a production of Genet's classic The Maids is thus kind of a dream come true: the perfect actress meets the perfect role (that of Solange, the elder sister).

But the production of the play created at the Sydney Theatre Company that is now being staged in NYC at City Center is an “updating” with a grand new physical presentation and dialogue that has been vulgarized (plenty of fucks and cunts can be heard in the dialogue) and updated to the 21st–century with pop culture references to match (among them, a namecheck of designer Alexander McQueen and a dumb-ass interpolation of “Hi-Ho” from the Disney Snow White).

The updates are felt right from the beginning, as “the Madame” (Cate Blanchett, actually the character Claire as the Madame) makes herself up, while her playful, childlike maid (Huppert as Solange assuming the role of Claire) does crazy exercise-ish dance moves on the bed while the Velvet Underground's “I'll Be Your Mirror” is pumped through the house loud speakers (see, the women are sisters and role-players – they're mirrors, see?). While it is a joy to see Blanchett glamorizing herself while Huppert, legs parted, does some very sexual calisthenics on the bed, the scene is a pointless addition that alerts the audience to the fact that this will be a very “light” production of the play.

But that isn't all we see – director Benedict Andrews and Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Andrew Upton's super-techno updating of the play (“Genet might be a great playwright, but a little mixed media can't hurt!”) means that a giant video screen is above the bedroom set. On the screen we see still-frame details of flowers, the Madame's dresses, shoes, and the like; we also see a different angle on the action (Blanchett's shoes, Huppert lying on the ground, the women looking into mirrors as they make themselves up) and actions that take place offstage.

Herein lies the most abrasive portion of this reviewer's experience seeing the play – I bought a ticket for a nosebleed seat in the back of the mezzanine specifically because it seemed to be well-located in relation to the stage and because the seat in question was not one labeled “obstructed view.” But it did have an obstructed view of the production as a whole – the kind and generous folks at the Lincoln Center Festival and City Center didn't bother to note when one bought a ticket that if you sat in the mezzanine, the video screen would be blocked by the underside of the upper balcony.

So I can report only on what appeared on the very bottom quadrant of the video screen, because my entire section was indeed one with an obstructed view. From what I could see of it, however, the technique was wildly unnecessary and simply intended to “soup up” the proceedings.

What I could see quite clearly was the video cameraman hidden behind the nearly transparent wall. This is an “effect” intended by our two Genet revisionists. What it succeeds in doing – and not in a good way – is distracting us from the actresses trying to breathe life into characters who have been denuded-beyond-denuding so we can watch a technician feverishly rolling a camera back and forth, doing his work all throughout the play. (Genet preferred his “layering” in the casting – wanting teenaged boys to play the maids – rather than in the staging and set design.)

So where one sits in City Center can make the production even more irritating (and the costly kind of irritating to boot). But onto the other changes made to the play by director Andrews – who is hailed in the press materials as “one of Australia's most regarded theatrical talents” (not highly regarded, just regarded), but who definitely seems to have a spiritual connection to his countryman Baz “let's update this storyline – our audience has no attention span!” Luhrmann.

Andrews stages The Maids primarily as a comedy. The tone given to the material, the delivery and pauses the actresses give to their lines, the constant rewrites of the lines (I'd swear I heard the phrase “old school” go by at one point), and the fact that so much of it was staged as farce, not drama, made certain that the audience could yuk it up.

Perhaps Andrews and Upton felt that the play needed a modern “tone” and that would be tongue-in-cheek. The manner in which the play is usually staged was reproduced in the American Film Theater's splendid 1974 film of the play starring Glenda Jackson and Susannah York.

That dramatic, heavily ceremonial tone is obviously something Andrews and Upton wished to “improve” upon, thus the farcical tone of his production – which then turns starkly dramatic every so often, when Andrews chose to return to the original text. The shift in tone dilutes the drama and seems to cast a pall over the audience, who, during the performance I saw, seemed disappointed by the dramatic moments and waiting with baited breath to laugh again. (It's the Baz Luhrmann Effect – keep things light and breezy!)

Lastly, there's the matter of casting. The 13 performances of the play are selling out in Manhattan because of the stellar duo in the lead roles. Blanchett is fresh off of winning an Oscar, and Huppert is arguably the best actress on the planet, so the two seem like a “dream team” in a well-known play with sexual/psychological/political overtones. (The last-mentioned aspect of the play is almost buried entirely in Andrews and Upton's vision, by the way.)

There is a definite oddness to the pairing, though, as Huppert is actually French and speaks heavily accented English (but pronounces the few French phrases and names that have been retained beautifully, as could be expected). Blanchett, for her part, starts out the play speaking in a British “posh” accent (when playing the Madame), and then returns to her own native Aussie accent (this being a production from Oz, after all) for the rest of the show.

Thus, playing two sisters who have presumably lived their whole life together in France, you have a real Frenchwoman and a lady from Oz. NYT critic Ben Brantley (who never met an encomium he didn't like) praised this casting, declaring that it “discounts any possibility of our accepting The Maids on easy naturalistic terms.” Good try, Ben (calm down, man!), but your mention of Huppert's accent being “unintelligible” means that the device is a failure. And it is.

To make the production even more odd, Andrews decided to vary the casting of the Madame away from the usual sort of actress who would play the role (an older aristocratic type, like Vivien Merchant in the 1974 AFT version). Instead he has cast Elizabeth Debicki (one of the stars of the Luhrmann “soup this up!” Great Gatsby), a sexy young actress who positively looms over Huppert (I couldn't tell if she's a foot taller, but she really dwarfs her fellow actress, even when barefoot).

So the Madame – who namechecks McQueen and is basically a fashion model who married well, instead of a pompous, condescending aristocrat – is a hot young number (the video feeds having shown us every line on Huppert and Blanchett's faces) who spends most of her time onstage in her lingerie and nothing more. In other productions, the sexual tension has been provided solely by the two actresses playing the maids, but in Andrews and Upton's rerowking, the Madame is also sexually charged, confusing matters entirely and, again, removing the overtly political aspect of Genet's original entirely.

As I started out saying above, though, Huppert can do no wrong. At the end of the play, she is left alone onstage to do a final monologue in which she speaks directly to the audience and reflects on her position in life.

This final scene erases (nearly) the memories of all of Andrews and Upton's innovations and brings the play back down to earth, and to the playacting dimension that is central to the whole affair. No more childlike bouncing around, no more focus on fashion, no more distractions from the acting and the dialogue, just an actress incarnating a character who herself is used to playing a role in her daily life.

Blanchett does wonderful things with her role, and Huppert ultimately triumphs over all the silly innovations dreamed up by Andrews and Upton. It's a shame they're not in a better production of this classic play.

The 'announcer's test' and the nonsense lyric

Summer is the season for silliness (and, evidently, alliteration). There is no greater place to discover purebred, 100% silliness than in novelty tunes (witness the recent welcome re-emergence of the one gent who singlehandedly has been keeping the genre alive, Weird Al). In this post I want to spotlight one piece of sheer ridiculousness and its connection to the world of “nonsense songs.”

Reportedly it was comic actor Del Moore who told Jerry Lewis about “the announcer's test,” a tongue-twisting, laundry-list recitation that was used at NBC to audition prospective radio performers. Lewis has been doing it now for more than half a century; I remember reading that at one point he recited it every night one week while guest-hosting The Tonight Show (I believe in the early Sixties).

The Wikipedia entry for “the announcer's test” indicates that Moore took the test in 1941 – at that point Jerry was a young comedian doing a record-miming act, so I doubt he stopped the records to do this crazy recitation. In any case, Jerry became identified with the piece, which starts off “One hen/one hen, two ducks/one hen, two ducks, three squawking geese...”

One has to wonder how many times Jerry rehearsed that, knowing his perfectionist, control-freak tendencies. The most curious entry in the recitation, concerning “Don Alverso's tweezers” (the name is also spelled “Alverzo”) is explained in one of the many books about Lewis, but I am damned if I can remember which book and who Alverso was – if you are in possession of such knowledge, leave it in the comments field.

People who are not Jerry fans (and I know you're out there, I can hear you audibly loathing him) might be familiar with this recitation as a silly memory test taught at scout camp or in school. I for one am always brought in mind of the “Sanzini Brothers,” the alter-egos of Flo and Eddie, who were the alter-egos of Mark Volman and Funhouse guest Howard Kaylan of the Turtles (seen right with some friends).
Howard and Mark did the announcer's test in their act as “the Tibetan Memory Trick” and included a live recording of it on their 1975 album Illegal, Immoral and Fattening.

I was unaware of the test's existence as a pop-rock single from 1962 – for this, I thank correspondent and “high”/“low” cultural connoisseur RC. The single was called “One Hen,” and it was performed by a group of studio singers named “the Blue Chips” for this project.

The men behind the single were Hugo & Luigi, two Italian-American cousins who worked in the music industry as writers, producers, and record label owners from the Fifties through the Seventies. Their careers included work with Sarah Vaughan, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis, Sam Cooke, and Isley Brothers. One of their final hits was “The Hustle” by Van McCoy in 1975.

In the meantime, they had a little habit at one point of taking foreign melodies and writing new lyrics (with co-writer George Weiss) without ever acknowledging the source for the melody. It's not known if they did this a lot, but there were two very big hits that were examples of this tendency: The Tokens' “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (from the South African musician Solomon Linda's song “Mbube,” better known over here thanks to Pete Seeger and the Weavers as “Wimoweh”) and Elvis's “Can't Help Falling in Love with You” (based on “Plaisr d'Amour” by Jean-Paul Egide Martini).

In this case there was no stated writer of the announcer's test, and they had to come up with the melody themselves (and it ain't much of a melody, just snippets of other tunes). It's quite a little ditty and it became the theme for radio personality Dick Summer (who I know and loved from his later days at WNBC and WYNY here in NYC) when he was on at nights on the Boston radio station WBZ. He called this crazy thing “The Nightlighter's Password.”

“One Hen” is simultaneously really catchy, very dopey, and kinda aggravating if you get it stuck in your cranium. After hearing it, I was brought in mind of the early nonsense songs that no doubt spawned it – tunes that were big hits that were also, by turns, catchy, dopey, and kinda aggravating.

Thus, I present a small handful of these suckers, since the subject of novelty tunes and nonsense songs is very wide, very broad, and most certainly deserves its own blog (it has its own podcast, on which more below; I'm sure there already is a novelty records blog – if so, lemme know in the comments field below).

These songs have existed since recording began, but they seemed to become super-popular with the advent of the big band era. In 1939, Kay Kyser had a major hit with “Three Little Fishes” (with its refrain “Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem chu!” – in looking that up, I got to see at least four distinct ways of spelling this nonsense).

The one that broke new ground by explaining its insanity was, of course, “Mairzy Doats,” the 1944 hit by the Merry Macs. The song is truly catchy as fuck, but like a lot of really good whodunits, it loses much of its allure once you've heard the “solution” (which one of the songwriters said came from his daughter's mispronunciation of something she learned in school), there's not much more to absorb.

Still, the song provides a great defense when the argument is put forth that all the music the “greatest generation” listened to was on the order of Gershwin, Porter, and Kern:
 

In the Fifties, nonsense songs exploded in the period before rock 'n' roll took hold of the mainstream. This kind of music regularly charted, was performed by name artists, and became its own subgenre throughout the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. The forefather of the whole (WWII and after) thing is of course the god Spike Jones (not Jonze), who begat all the later great weirdo acts, from Tom Lehrer to Zappa with all the stops in between. Spike requires his own blog post, and more than likely his own fan-appreciation blog....

You can blame the emergence of a steady output of novelty 45s on the supposedly super-wholesome and anodyne nature of Fifties culture (a concept that is disproved when one actually digs into Fifties culture), or perhaps because there were more producers like Mitch Miller who put novelties in the mainstream with “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” and “Mule Train” (with its whipcrack); I prefer to nostalgize about the record Sinatra considered his worst, “Mama Will Bark.” 

In the early Fifties, the nonsense songs weren't as nonsensical. In fact some were was downright educational, like the Four Lads' “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” (which most likely spawned Soupy's awesome “Pachalfaka”). Younger listeners recall the 1990 cover of the song by They Might Be Giants, a band that has ventured into novelty-tune waters (and later kiddie music) at various points in their long career (the duo also has a penchant for writing earworm compositions whose lyrics cannot be dissected).

I was taught this ditty by my mother as a small child. She never embraced rock 'n' roll heavily in the Fifties, but she did fall victim to the occasional novelty ditty:

I could go on and on about novelty records, but won't (right now). I will, though, point you to an act that followed in the tradition I've been talking about, the vocal combo known as the Gaylords. They were a trio of Italian-Americans (do you sense a trend here? Another post could handle Lou Monte and nonsense deity Louis Prima!) doing songs like “The Little Shoe Maker” and “Ma-Ma-Ma-Marie.” 

But the earworms, man, the earworms... When the group performed in a distinctly non-Italian mode, they sang catchy Fifties tunes like this impossible-to-forget paean to a Chinese restaurant (which apparently has gotten a second life to a Mafia video game):

KBC – he of the Bitslap podcast – provided my intro to the music of the Gaylords. In one show he did a looooong time ago, KBC not only played “No More Chow Mein,” but the ditty below, “Papa Poppadopolis, the Happy Locksmith Man.” There is an incredible innocence at work here (the kind that was gone around the time of another song about a profession, Meri Wilson's “Telephone Man” – yes, the novelty-record trove goes deep, it goes verrrrry deep....).

And because this must end somewhere, I punctuate this discussion with a novelty/nonsense song that does actually hurt my head. It's sung by the calmest man in music, Perry Como, and is a carefully crafted tune that has a little “secret” to it... well, you'll figure it out in a line or two and you'll scream for mercy. This discussion of nonsense in music will be resumed at some point in the future.

Thanks to RC for the original “discussion” about “One Hen.” My thanks also go to the intrepid KBC, who continues to do excellent work on his weekly “Bitslap” podcast. He's currently on a short summer layoff, but has left us several years worth of old episodes and promises to be back in September!