Ah, once again the holidays are upon us. I don’t exactly let all my anti-social skepticism suddenly drop just because the first flakes of snow start to fall and I end up eating more turkey than anyone with sense would ever consume. Indeed, if anything the holidays make me even grumpier than usual.
Take the annual festival of avarice known in the halls of commerce as Black Friday, touted on the airwaves as After-Thanksgiving Sales, and celebrated in the Lens household as Buy Nothing Day. It could just be all the turkey I ate, but I actually get a little ill every year when the local news calls upon me to witness the spectacle of morons camped out in below-freezing conditions for two nights in a row (thus missing Thanksgiving dinner with their families) just so they can be first in line for sale prices at Best Buy.
That said, however, I must concede that I too have some masochistic holiday traditions that I observe religiously every year. Chief among these is my irrational addiction to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, also known as our annual reminder that for some reason Up With People still exists. I have a dim childhood memory of being taken to the parade when I was a wee toddler, but of course the tradition now centers not on the live, in-person experience but on TV coverage thereof.
This year, as ever, the televised versions sucked. I surfed back and forth between NBC and CBS, switching whenever one went to a commercial, dwelled on a marching band rather than the floats and balloons, or turned the broadcast over entirely to idle chatter between the co-hosts. I admit that a sane, detached person would never endure any of this. Indeed, Mrs. Lens usually sleeps through it or beats a hasty retreat to another room. The only way I can preserve my cherished childhood custom is to turn off the critical faculties upon which this column depends.
Every once in awhile something shows up that stirs me temporarily from my stupor. For example, the sight of The Crocodile Hunter’s widow and orphan doing a jump-up-and-down dance on a float that looked as if it might collapse at any moment suggested the possibility of a show-spoiling bit of grim coincidence. I was also disturbed by the Sesame Street float, which sported the desiccated corpse of Bob – the only cast member left from when I watched the show as a kid – still bravely lip-syncing away. Otherwise, however, I was content to turn my critical thinker off and just accept the spectacle at face value.
With one exception: the musical numbers. Before the parade itself gets within camera range, the networks (particularly NBC, though CBS did a little of it as well) kill time by airing performances from the Broadway stage. Or to be more precise, Broadway production numbers performed in front of Macy’s. Normally I try not to object to the practice too much, though of course I’d rather look at the parade itself.
But this year something about the numbers caught my eye. The acts I saw came from five musicals: Spamalot, Legally Blonde, Young Frankenstein, Xanadu and Mary Poppins. One immediately notices something about this set: they’re all musicals that were originally movies. The last two were musical movies, so I can only assume that translating them for the stage was a relatively harmless act. Likewise Legally Blonde was already sufficiently terrible that I don’t expect Broadway could damage it much.
The other two, on the other hand, did make my stomach lurch a bit (and no, it wasn’t the turkey, because the uncooked bird was still in the fridge at that point). I liked the movie version of Young Frankenstein, and the number they did from it was sufficiently dreadful to make me shudder at the thought of what the whole musical must be like. Perhaps I should just take comfort in the fact that Mel Brooks hasn’t turned Spaceballs into a musical. Yet.
But the one that really bugged me was Spamalot. The number they did was “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Monty Python fans of course know that this song comes not from Monty Python and the Holy Grail but from Life of Brian. In its original context, the chipper lyrics are completely ironic; the song is performed by a group of people who are dying of crucifixion. But now it seems to be an earnest reminder that “if life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten” belted out by gaily-cavorting knights and women in skimpy raincoats.
Perhaps it’s doubly ironic to take an ironically-sunny number and turn it into a genuinely-sunny number. But then again, perhaps not.
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