TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/121189/12118900.038

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 4KB | 65 lines

SHOW BUSINESS, Page 109

Wild Seed in the Big Apple

Garrison Keillor returns with a New York-based radio show

By John Skow


    Alas, Powdermilk Bagels, the brand that gives shy New Yorkers
the strength to jump over subway turnstiles, was not among the
sponsors. Garrison Keillor, the wandering Minnesota minstrel whose
Prairie Home Companion variety show on public radio told tales of
gentle eccentricity in a hard-to-find Midwestern hamlet called Lake
Wobegon, says he has put shyness behind him. Just as well. Keillor,
whose new American Radio Company of the Air fills the old P.H.C.
Saturday-evening slot (6 to 8 p.m. EST), is now a New Yorker
himself, an unstrained and wildly germinating seed in the Big
Applesauce. Like all Gotham residents, he told listeners on
A.R.C.'s first broadcast, he tries to project an image of
aggressive lunacy as he walks the streets, by muttering constantly
to himself.

    Works fine, he reported. Not only do muggers edge away
nervously, but Keillor thinks up a lot of good material as he
mumbles. Thus the new show: recycled mugger-repellent. What kind
of new show? Some comedy, centered more in the present than the
nostalgic P.H.C. was, he said a few days before the first
broadcast. But mostly "fine, classic American music; music to make
people throw babies in the air." Tunes for the old show, which he
closed with a teary farewell broadcast in June 1987 (tearier second
and third farewells followed, and a fourth is plotted for next
June), tended to be guitar-based bluegrass and country, not
counting the occasional trombone choir playing Lapland milking
songs.

    A classy 16-piece orchestra, no less, anchors the A.R.C.
series, most of whose broadcasts will come from the Majestic
Theater in Brooklyn, a spectacularly decayed old burlesque house
belonging to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The first broadcast
detonated with a finger-snapping zum-bum-ooo-ooo singing group
called True Image, headed uptown with show tunes swung elegantly
by soprano Eileen Farrell, the diva who stops being 70 when she
opens her mouth, then went gloriously low-down with Jelly Roll
Morton tunes by pianist Butch Thompson, the fine St. Paul
barrelhouser from the P.H.C. days. Flying babies filled the air.

    Was this just P.H.C. at the Plaza? Sure. Maybe. No. There was,
of course, a rambling dispatch from Lake Wobegon (Pastor Ingqvist,
Keillor reported with approval, shocked his congregation at
Thanksgiving by urging them to "sin boldly"). Tom Keith, P.H.C.'s
sound-effects wizard, was on hand to provide, among other
arcanities, the splash of George Washington's silver dollar falling
short into the Rappahannock. The show's funniest sketch, a serial,
produced a new star, actress Ivy Austin. She plays Gloria, big-city
girl, whose boyfriend (as she confesses endlessly to her
hairdresser) wants her to give up everything (a shoe-box
apartment), move to Seattle and marry him. Keillor says that when
he started to write the script, his hero was a plucky male writer
who moved to Manhattan, but Gloria, the archetypal tough, yearning
New York woman, muscled in and took over.

    What next? Minnesota Public Radio, which produces A.R.C., has
committed to a run of four shows, then six weeks of P.H.C. repeats,
then 16 more live shows. Keillor hopes that A.R.C. will broadcast
weekly after that, carried largely by its troupe of musicians and
actors. "My idea is to make myself redundant," he says. This could
be awkward. To the unpersuaded who couldn't stand P.H.C., he has
always been redundant. But millions of others, who interrupted
wedding receptions, marital quarrels and dinner parties to listen,
are unlikely to accept substitutes.