Nobody seemed to be, and that part got a lot of laughs. Mind, we did change a couple of things for humorous effect, and the actors played it well–Penny was super-ditzy, giggling when she said “lust” and “sex”; and the Kirbys’ exchange was dripping with sarcasm:
“Wall Street! What do you mean by that, darling?”
“I don’t know what I meant, sweetheart. Nothing.”
“But you must have meant something, babycakes, or you wouldn’t have put it down.”
“It was just the first thing that came into my head, snookums, that’s all.”
I’d guess that the way the actors delivered their lines, and the escalating silliness of the pet names, smoothed over any offense that may have arisen.
This reminds me. I was also in a local production of Kiss Me Kate, which has been discussed in the thread.
I mentioned above about local religiosity, and our KMK production went about as close to the line as was possible. Lilli still called Fred “Bastard!” in all the proper places, the dancers in the “Too Darn Hot” number wore short skirts and showed a lot of leg, Lois was played as a cheap tramp who would put out for anybody who would help her get ahead (she’s written that way, of course, but our Lois really emphasized that part of her character), and during “I Hate Men,” the actress playing Lilli/Kate lay on her back with her legs spread wide in the air for the line, “But don’t forget 'tis he who’ll have the fun and thee the baby.” A few did take offense at these, and other, things; and one of the theatre staffers reported later that during a few performances, some people left early, remarking on how disgusting and filthy the show was. But the vast majority of people enjoyed the show, and it got great reviews.
In one of his Jeeves and Wooster stories (I forget the title), P G Wodehouse has Wooster sneak off a boat by getting into blackface and bending in with a group of “n****r minstrels.” In the TV show with Fry and Laurie, he does so by getting into blackface and blending in with a bunch of other white men in blackface. Of course, today, that isn’t much of a PC improvement!
Now I’m going to have to get it from Netlix, since I’m positive that when I saw the movie on TV, a while back, the words were gone. I especially noticed since I love the song, my mother had the cast album, and as mentioned I saw it at McCarter. (Where the song was in the proper place, of course.) I wouldn’t put it past the network to have done the cut, though.
Moving the song, and changing the singer, did tone it down also.
I played Kirby in a production and I loved that part every night. Unfortunately the girl playing Mrs. Kirby was just dead- not deadpan, just monotone. Still got laughs though.
Ragtime is one of my favorite musicals. There’s a song called “The Night that Goldman Spoke at Union Square” that includes the line
Poor young rich boy,
masturbates for a Vaudeville tart
what a waste of a fiery heart…dear!
It’s often changed in regional and college productions, such as this great production from Belmont U.where it becomes “salivates for a Vaudeville tart”. What I think is darkly humorous is the hate crimes against a black guy, a temporarily insane indigent mother burying her child alive, racial epithets against blacks and Irish, etc., the words goddamn and shit, etc., are all left intact, but when you’ve masturbated you’ve crossed a line.
The play Miss Saigon has been licensed now to community theaters and high school performances and some of the results are hysterical. For starters very few schools have enough Asian students to depict Saigon and Bangkok where 90% of the scenes take place so you’ve got a bunch of white kids running around dressed like Asian prostitutes. What’s incredible though is that they would choose it in the first place when they feel compelled to changed the lyrics that include sexual slang and Asian slurs, and in a play about wartime whores and GIs in Vietnam and then the red light districts of Bangkok you’d be surprised how many sexual slang and Asian slurs that is. If interested use the terms “miss saigon high school” for some clips of productions and even if you’ve never seen the musical before you’ll know where nip/tucks have been made.
I have a copy of the play Sherlock Holmes and the Sign of Four; Or the Curse of the Timber Toe. It’s mostly a straight stage adaptation of Doyle’s The Sign of Four, but the script offers an alternate scene for high schools. The original play has a scene in which Holmes is chided by Watson for taking an injection of cocaine (a scene that’s in the book, by the way, and in the Doyle/Gillette play Sherlock Holmes, which was revived on Broadway in the 1970s) , but the school-friendly version substitutes a non-drug scene in which Watson challenges Holmes to deduce the character of the owner of a pocket watch (which is adapterd straight from another of Doyle’s Holmes stories)
Well, the show was originally produced in 1948, so “Kinsey Report” would be familiar to audiences of that era. And it does help set the show in its proper timeframe: the late 1940s.
But sixty-plus years later, I’d suggest that the Kinsey Report wouldn’t ring a bell with many ordinary people–since its publication, we’ve had more scholarly work in the same field done by Masters and Johnson, and Shere Hite. More popularly, Dr. Ruth Westheimer rose to prominence in a variety of media, and Sue Johansson took viewers’ calls on TV. The Kinsey Report may still be good science (or maybe not; I don’t know), but it is just one of many now, and an old one at that.
I’d suggest that changing the lyric to “latest report” had nothing to do with political correctness. It just helps modern audiences enjoy the song and the show more easily than if they heard a reference to something that they had little to no idea about. They don’t stop to take themselves out of the experience to try to remember what it was; or worse, discuss it with each other during the performance. They just continue understanding (and hopefully, enjoying) what they are seeing and hearing. Our production used the “latest report” lyric for just that reason.
A reference to a 1948 book in a 1953 movie is dated? Nah, especially when I Love Lucy made jokes about the reports in the same time frame.
More likely, Kinsey’s well-received *Sexual Behavior in the Human Male *had recently been superceded by the far more polarizing Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published earlier in 1953. The first volume was a best-seller, largely because it was no great stretch for many people to surmise that men had a lot of sexual variety over the course of their lives. When Kinsey said similar things about women, however, it didn’t go over so well, and ‘Kinsey’ became something of a dirty word.
That, and film was a bit more restrictive about such things than theater in those days.
I heard about this in library school when we were talking about controversial books. Aside from the outdated depictions of non-white people that you might expect from such an old book, my professor said there was a sequence in The Story of Doctor Dolittle that is often significantly revised or omitted entirely from even “unabridged” editions of the book today.
I haven’t read this myself, but there’s apparently a character named Bumpo who’s an African prince and is obsessed with European fairy tales. He believes he’s ugly because he’s black (and apparently others feel the same – he’s rejected by a princess), so he gets Dr. Dolittle to make a potion that will transform him into a white man. The potion works, and Prince Bumpo is able to marry the princess.
They are both part of the same scene in the original novel. Watson chides Holmes for taking cocaine, then offers the watch as an intellectual excercise, as an alternative.
So, the original play has the cocaine use, but omits the watch? A strange thing to omit. It’s one of Holmes’ finest examples of logical deduction.
They’d stopped making the cartoons long before. I never saw any of them on TV myself (Disney or Lantz), but i know lots of things have run elsewhere in the country. But if some station decided to stop running the cartoons because of the similarity in name, that’s not the same as ceasing production.
Jesus Christ Superstar’s Damned for All Time has Caiphas singing to Judas “What you have done will be the saving of Israel.” The film version changed it to “the saving of everyone.”
I didn’t understand why they did this in 1973, and I still don’t.
