Strong songs, but short on spark – While ‘Pete ‘n’ Keely’ captures that great variety-show sound, the repartee needs a kick
by Chad Jones – Palo Alto Weekly
Oh, to bring back the super-cheesy days of the television variety show. In the 1950s, Milton Berle, Jack Paar and the like filled the airwaves with sketch comedy and snazzy musical numbers. In the ’60s, the British invasion threatened to bring some class and some genuine rock to variety shows, but thankfully, that never really happened. Cheese reigned supreme.
By the 1970s, when Sonny and Cher bickered and Donny and Marie ice skated, the format wobbled, and it took the combined cheeseballishness of Tony Orlando and Dawn and the Mandrell Sisters to put the variety show out of its misery. And we won’t even discuss “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.” Too painful.
Those of us who grew up loving variety shows in all their hard-working absurdity have a soft spot for a show like “Pete ‘n’ Keely,” the Palo Alto Players’ ode to yesteryear now at the Lucie Stern Theatre.
An off-Broadway hit in 2000, the musical revue by James Hindman — which combines original songs by Patrick Brady (music) and Mark Waldrop (lyrics) with great American standards — purports to take place in 1968. We’re in the NBC television studio audience for the taping of a variety show starring America’s former singing sweethearts, Pete Bartel and Keely Stevens.
Now divorced, Pete ‘n’ Keely haven’t spoken in five years, not since their final Vegas appearance at Caesar’s Palace. In an attempt to grab ratings, sponsor Swell shampoo has engineered a reunion full of bad jokes, goofy medleys and buckets of show-biz bitterness.
Anyone worth their variety show salt will pick up immediately on the fact that Pete ‘n’ Keely are inspired by the world’s greatest singing married couple (no, not Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love): the one and only Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
Steve and Eydie fell in love on a variety show — Steve Allen’s “The Tonight Show” — and spent most of the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s as guest stars on every imaginable variety show, though they were both intermittently brilliant on one of the all-time great variety shows, “The Carol Burnett Show.”
For the record, Steve and Eydie are still married — they celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary this December — and though Eydie has hung up her concert hat, Steve is still touring.
One day somebody will pay proper tribute to Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme with a full-blown musical biography incorporating their best songs. Until then, we have “Pete ‘n’ Keely,” a cheerful facsimile of their career that imagines what might happen if, like Sonny and Cher, the singing duo had broken up in the limelight, faded from the scene and attempted to reemerge as a still-warbling duo.
Just so there’s no doubt that Pete and Keely are stand-ins for Steve and Eydie, the show’s first number, a chipper ditty called “It’s Us Again” makes direct reference to “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” a hit for Steve and Eydie, which is actually performed in a more expanded version later in the show.
The problem is that neither Pete nor Keely is as charming or as talented as Steve or Eydie. Their cartoonish bickering grows tiresome, and they don’t have that old-time show-business gusto that fueled all the great stars of variety television who seemed able to do it all: physical shtick, character comedy and complicated musical numbers.
Kate McCormick as Keely and Justin Taylor Nixon as Pete are both appealing, and both have beautiful voices. It’s just that they both seem to be musical-comedy performers and not crooners of a 1950s and ’60s vintage. On stage, they read young, unlike Steve and Eydie who seemed perpetually in their 50s even in their 30s and 60s, and who could sell any song with more ballsy brio than all the members of the Rat Pack combined.
Director John Kirman emphasizes sincerity over cheesy campiness, which really works only in the heartfelt ballads (“Still” and “Wasn’t It Fine”). The so-called zingers that the former husband and wife throw at each other lack zing, and the strained comic atmosphere on stage is not helped by the performers accentuating each uncomfortable line with a forced chuckle.
The repartee may be awkward, but the music helps keep the show percolating through much of its nearly two-hour run. Act 1 ends with a monster cross-country medley incorporating just about any song you can think involving a state or a city name. Though one must quibble with a medley supposedly from a 1961 concert tour that includes the song “Seattle,” a theme song from a TV show that wouldn’t appear for another seven years.
In Act 2, Pete and Keely get a couple of nice solos: She tackles “Black Coffee” and he works up a “Fever.” The only sparks that flew during a recent matinee came in a nearly ferocious “Love,” and the show-ending “That’s All” had the kind of laidback spark that would have been helpful through much of the preceding show.
The onstage quintet — headed by musical director David Manley at the piano — captured that great variety-show sound, especially when the horns (played by Mike Parykaza on trumpet and Hermann Lara on saxophone, flute and clarinet) kicked in and blared.
“Pete ‘n’ Keely,” for all its flaws, is a nice nod in the Steve and Eydie direction, but let’s hold out for that official Lawrence-Gorme musical bio. Now that could really be the start of something big.
