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You remember all of
it, whether you want to or not.
You recall Greg’s
constant striving for some exalted state of grooviness. You remember
Marsha’s dilemma: should she follow in Carol’s footsteps as a homemaker or
take up the imperatives demanded of her by the burgeoning women’s movement?
That dilemma was complicated by the prospect of that dreamy guy who could,
conceivably, ask her to the prom.
And what about
those overlooked middle kids? Peter, devoid of a personality and only
occasionally irked by the fact. Jan, cranking even the most mundane
annoyance into a crisis. Finally, the twin ciphers, Bobby and Cindy —
defined by little more than a saccharine punch line every fifth episode.
And with a wince,
you remember the macramé vests, wide-leg bell-bottoms, that haircut that
made Carol look as though she was wearing an octopus on her head, and the
use of the adjective “groovy” with a straight face.
And what about
Alice, the domestic who seemed to be employed as the family’s court jester?
All these matters
have taken on a particular urgency for the cast of The Brady Bunch Live,
which opens tonight at the Bathurst Street Theater. To get the rights to do
live performances of the TV series’ original scripts, the production has to
deliver them exactly as written — word for bland, predictable word. And
while that’s constricting in one way, it frees the cast to subvert what’s on
the page with their performances.
“We’re trying to
find a balance,” says Colin Mochrie, the actor charged with reanimating the
Solomon-like wisdom and puckish humor of patriarch Mike Brady. “We don’t in
any way want to insult the rabid Brady fans, and yet it’s got to be
entertaining enough for people who aren’t Brady fans.”
Some may scoff at
the theatrical resurrection of a sitcom about the marriage of a widow and a
widower and their combined family that ended its run 20 years ago and has
been in syndication ever since. But it’s a strange if puzzling fact that few
other television programs have proven so hard to kill. Only the legion of
Star Trek fans seems as faithful and obsessive, and their ardor has been
kept alive with a series of movies and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Brady brigade has had to content itself with the same five seasons’
worth of episodes in an endless rerun loop. (The show debuted in 1969 and
ran until 1974.)
But The Brady
Bunch endures, which has made this affectionate stage satire a hit in
Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
According to the
play’s producer, Robin Payne, The Brady Bunch is “the Kraft Dinner of
TV. . . . You know it’s not that good for you, and you know there’s finer
food. But if you’re feeling depressed, you can eat some Kraft Dinner and
it’s like when you were five or six — it’s the same comfort feeling.”
Ridicule is another
reason for bringing back the show. The stage version aims to invest life
chez Brady with ironic subtext.
“When it came to
deciding on the presentation or style of the show, we decided against going
with Brady impersonators,” says Bruce Pirrie, the Second City
writer-director who’s working out the performance’s details and nuances. “I
figure in the long run that our strength would be in performers who would be
able to bring some kind of inner life to these characters.”
That’s why the cast
comprises people with strong backgrounds in improvisational comedy who have
to rely on their word-for-word delivery of the scripts to create irony.
“Subtext never
existed on The Brady Bunch,” Pirrie says. “If it had been written
better, it might indicate or point to something. Everyone knows that Hamlet
has an inner life because he trots around saying that he does. Just because
Peter Brady doesn’t say he does doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.”
But what is that
subtext, exactly? The cast is working on defining it. For example, they
postulate that Alice may have been more to Mike than just an employee prior
to his marriage to Carol.
Getting the
original scripts from Paramount also revealed that chunks had been excised
before the shows were filmed. This production restores those lost Brady
moments.
“It’s like
Spartacus,” Colin Mochrie says. “This is the director’s cut. We should
have it letterboxed.”
Robin Payne is
cautious about too much analysis, however. “Some people say things like,
‘Oh, the sexual tension between Greg and Marsha.’ But I don’t really buy it.
I think there’s something to be said about magic. Not to elevate The
Brady Bunch too much, but there was something about it. Maybe it was
because there were enough kids that everybody could identify with one age or
one gender. It hit a chord. Something happened. . . . We’re pathetic, aren’t
we? We can’t talk about Tolstoy, but we’re down with The Brady Bunch.”
Whatever chord it
hit, The Brady Bunch left a lasting impression. Both Payne and Pirrie
were surprised during auditions at the number of people who showed up in
full Brady regalia — people driven only by a burning desire to become one of
the members of the Brady family. Many claimed they had a special, innate
understanding of Jan or Greg or Marsha.
But that kind of
zeal misses the point. The show aims to revel in the cheesy, rickety plots,
creaky writing and two-dimensional characters, while, at the same time,
holding the whole mess at arm’s length in order to laugh in disbelief that
anyone ever watched more than 10 minutes of it.
That’s an approach
to the past peculiar to people who grew up in the 1970s. “How can you do
anything else, when what we grew up with was brown polyester?” Payne
wonders. “I think it’s very healthy, personally. It’s horrible, but you love
it — it’s your past.”
“It’s like
witnessing a car wreck, but you’re in the car wreck,” is how director Pirrie
describes it. “It’s a two-fold way that people have of looking at — ‘Ah, my
reckless youth. It’s gone’ and ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ I think
The Brady Bunch has as much to say as our own reactions to it. It’s like
a blank wall . . . well, maybe a beige wall.”
Anyone faced with
the prospect of performing these scripts had to overcome a significant
mortification hurdle as rehearsals began. But the large cast helped. No
matter how inane a particular performer’s line might be, it was a sure bet
that everyone else in the cast would have to make similarly dopey
utterances.
“The most
embarrassing part of it had nothing to do with the script,” Mochrie says.
“It was the costume fittings. You’re wearing these costumes and you’re
thinking, ‘Man, I wore stuff like this. I wore this and thought I was so
sharp.’”
Initially, the show
is set to run for four weeks, reprising the first episode of the series.
Each show opens with a 40-minute improvisational session dealing with
seventies TV and based on audience suggestions. The actual episode
re-enactment runs about 40 minutes.
After that, a new episode will be performed every two weeks, beginning with
“Personality Kid,” the episode containing Peter’s delivery of the phrase
“pork chops and applesauce” several dozen times.
Advance ticket
inquiries indicate a sizable audience eager to guffaw at its collectively
embarrassing past. Payne relates an overheard conversation which sums up the
response: “Three people were talking about this in a restaurant, and one
said, ‘Oh yeah — I want to go and see that.’ Another guy said, ‘What do you
want to go see that for? It was an awful show. Don’t bother.’ But they
talked about it for more than an hour, and by the end, it was like, ‘Yeah,
that does sound like fun. Okay, let’s all get tickets.’” |
