Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

12 | Hallowed Be Thy Game

236 Sherman’s rightly forgotten musical is preserved only in works such as Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, but at least one of its songs is worth remembering. The Fig Leaves Are Falling opened on January 2, 1969, at New York’s Broadhurst Theater and closed after four performances. The idea for it was lifted directly from Sherman’s life, but the show itself did not embody an idea at all, just tired sentiments and urges that sunk the work and exposed his personal failings. Like Sherman, the play’s middle-aged hero, Harry Stone, has a wife, Lillian, of twenty years; a son and a daughter; and a mistress twenty years his junior named Pookie that the New York Times described as “a mini-skirted mini-brain.” During the course of the show, Stone must choose between Lillian and Pookie, but their names alone relieve any tension surrounding the eventual decision, which the actors sometimes called upon the audience to help solve. Sherman unwisely brought some of his game show background to the stage. In the 1950s, part of his job as a television producer was to whip up audience enthusiasm, and Harry Stone tries the same, at one point asking all Hallowed Be Thy Game Hallowed Be Thy Game / 237 the men in the audience that “have been unfaithful to their wives to raise their hands.” A reviewer assures his readers, “Don’t worry, they don’t have the nerve to go through with it. But there are enough other things to be embarrassed by.” One of these, noted the New Yorker, was a “very low point” when Stone, playedbyBarryNelson,“awardedaroastchickentoticket-holderB-3—alady from Sarasota, who sounded understandably dismayed by her good fortune.” WitlessgimmickswerenottheworstFigLeaveshadtooffer.“Oddlyenough, the show is not as exasperating as its attitude,” one critic wrote. The offending attitude was familiar to the ever-fewer listeners Sherman’s albums found after 1964. It was fear of “America’s youth revolution. The whole business of young idealism. . . . But there is one part of this revolution that this mentality finds veryappealingandthat,ofcourse,issexualfreedom.NowTHERE issomething that appeals to [Stone and his ilk]—all those mini-skirts willing to be lifted.” This attitude was merely immaturity, and it was deadly. “All the innuendoes, leers, the self-conscious coyness is unbearable,” a reviewer wrote. It was more proof that by the late 1960s Sherman was completely out of touch. A review in The Hollywood Reporter had no trouble diagnosing the problem. The people in Larchmont, from whence Sherman’s hero and the bulk of his potential audience come, know by now that their kids didn’t just march for the sake of marching or blast the establishment in the same way that daddy used to swallow a goldfish. They’re also beginning to discover that they’re more than sex-deprived pinheads. But these are the bizarre premises of the “Fig Leaves” book, and nobody, not even in Larchmont, ever bought humor without an anchor in reality. The musical’s saving grace was the actress Dorothy Loudon, who played Lillian, the show’s most intelligent and sympathetic character. Sherman realized , at least in the part of himself that wrote, that he should not have left his wife. Fig Leaves’ second act, which even its severest critics admitted was entertaining, came to life because it centered on Lillian, who is celebrated in therousing,“Lillian,Lillian,Lillian,”andpermittedtoblossominherdelivery of “All My Laughter,” which expresses her awakening after her husband leaves her for Pookie but before he returns home. Some reviewers hated the show 238 / Overweight Sensation so much they could not bother to praise Sherman for the songs they liked, but Variety recognized that though the story was terrible, “one outstanding element . . . are the lyrics by Sherman.” In “All My Laughter,” he got across the endlessdesireforsensationhesatisfiedthroughthestimulantsofperformance, sex, gambling, eating, drinking, and laughter. I want to laugh All of my laughter I want to cry All of my tears I want to turn on the lights And see all of the sights And hear all of the music before it disappears. I want to sing All of my love songs I want to drink All of my wine I want to ride on a skylark And fly a giraffe This life is my lark And I won’t take half. I want to laugh All of my laughter before I go. The trouble with the wish expressed...