Right Up Your Alley

About two o'clock yesterday afternoon it occured to me I was going to get to be the first person to call a Pudding show camp. The thought was dizzying. How could a Tiffany lamp compare with a kick line of fat, hairy, drunken, grimacing clubbies in falsies? Here was the definitive example. Everyone would say uhuh and perhaps even Time magazine would stop using the word.

Only it isn't true, as I realized about the time I decided that Tiffany lamps were indeed what costume mistress Barbara Matheson was trying to make her hockey players look like. A Pudding show is about as camp as scotch and water. Athletes have been dressing up like whores as long as there've been college dining halls. There's nothing decadent in that. Dirty jokes are nothing new. People have been laughing at them for ages. Right Up Your Alley is in an ancient and venerable tradition. The only thing wrong with it is it's not funny.

It says in the program the show is "from a book by Brian McGunigle and Steven Shea. Presumably that means it was even worse to start with. Hard to believe. There isn't exactly a plot, except that a couple of people get married at the end. Every reasonable beginning of a complication gets more or less forgotten or patched up in the following scene. One entire love interest, for example, which inspires a song (a pretty nice one) that Dean Stolber sings three times in all, simply evaporates.

This lack of development makes it hard to approach the show as anything more than one long vaudeville routine. That would be fine, except there aren't any funny lines. Even the opening night audience wasn't convulsed. They laughed, sure. Mostly at the actors. But they never lost control.

That leaves the music, the lyrics, and the acting. I can't decide whether Stephen Kaplan's lyrics, clever as they were, were forced on their own or only seemed so for want of better music. I suspect the latter.

Irwin Carson and Mike Tschudin don't seem to have understood what kind of a show they were writing for. Their few pretty melodies got clobbered. Most of the tunes were too subtle. The one tune I can remember is the title song but I remember liking "Miss America Teen" at the time.

All this is very sad. For individual performances by many members of the cast demonstrated what an enjoyable thing a Pudding show can be. First on anyone's list must come Nick Whitlam and Tony Fingleton. Their "Career Girls" number was the best of the night, and they had good moments in their other roles as girl friends and undertakers.

Next is Billy Mason as Sharon Sharalike, "Woman of Joy." He's the only actor who honest-to-god created a character with a personality--as opposed to a collection of quirks. His "Heart of Gold" number came alive even though the words were almost totally unintelligible.

As the program says, Dean Stolber is in a class by himself. Agreed. He sings and dances better than anyone else. But he seemed to be in a play by himself. Admittedly his character, Preston Quagmire, is a starry-eyed sort, but that's no excuse for Stolber's failure to play with the other actors. Somebody's got to pace the scenes and he should have been the one in many of them.

Stu Beck was a perfect choice for Mrs. Irving. He played her, properly, as a lady Bilko. Oddly enough, he wasn't a knock out. I still can't figure out why.

Son Big Irving, as played by George Denny, was also disappointing, probably because he did not, the script not withstanding, have "moxie, charisma and brass." Or charm. If he had, he could have set some of the numbers on fire.

Bill Weld played Vera Similitude as though she were a gigantic doll. After this stopped being amusing (about three minutes, Vera became a liability, since she was substantially less believable than the rest of the characters).

Genaro Payan was a respectable Manuel Dexterity. He could have been a great one. Peter Fine could have been a hilarious Dipton Mudd, but his delivery was strangely weak.

Some of the blame for all the wasted mugs and chestnuts must go to director Billy Wilson. He's a professional, but Pudding shows clearly aren't his style. Many of the dance numbers were far too tricky not to be chaotic. And despite the dead script he should have been able to put a few of the jokes over.

Miss Matheson's costumes were, likewise, very imaginative. But it's hard to see the point of dressing the Studs in Modrian prints and polo helmets.

Peter Ivers designed the lighting which was exceptionally good. If he thought up the Keystone cops jail-break scene they should let him direct the next one.

I've been told you have to see Pudding shows drunk, that if you know Alex and Peter it's just twice as funny and you should have been there the night we rewrote the igloo scene, etc.--in short, that you've got to love this sort of thing to like it all. Not necessarily. Considering the possibilities of the genre, Rght Up Your Alley is a real dog.