Showing results for "Performing Cities" in Performing Arts

Authors Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key build on the popularity of their 2022 Webby Award-winning podcast and delve deeper into the world of sketch, helped along with new essays created expressly for the book by comedy greats.

Spike Jones and his City Slickers enjoyed perhaps their finest hour in March 1948, when they performed in Washington, DC at the request of President Harry Truman. They do a slam-bang up job on “I’m Just Wild About Harry” on the opening show in this volume, in anticipation of their visit. Getting The Spike Jones Show on the air took a lot of advance planning from week to week, with schedule and location dictated by the band’s lucrative road show and its cross-country tours of one-night stands.

The best comedy-novelty band of all time was at its peak when The Spike Jones Show (officially The Spotlight Revue, better known as The Coke Show) debuted on CBS, Friday, October 3, 1947. The show premiered in San Francisco where Spike and his City Slickers’ wacky Musical Depreciation Revue was holding forth at the Curran Theatre. The guest list here includes musical humorist Victor Borge (savaging “Clair de Lune” on the premiere), Tex Williams (doing his signature “Smoke Smoke Smoke”), Mel Torme and Frankie Laine.

Many of the episodes on this volume were broadcast from Hollywood, but the program (which finally became The Spike Jones Show when it moved to a Sunday evening time slot in January 1949) traveled extensively in its last season—New Orleans, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Richmond, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, and San Francisco.

This volume of The Spike Jones Show features episodes emanating from Las Vegas, Pueblo, Colorado, and Calipatria, California—where Spike grew up and started his first band—but most of the programs here were broadcast from Hollywood. The guest list reflects the change in locale. Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Peter Lorre (vocalizing “My Old Flame” with impressionist Paul Frees in tow), Don Ameche (doing “Quartet from Rigor Mortis”), Dinah Shore and Fred Astaire (performing “Cheek to Cheek”), Jerry Colonna, and Basil Rathbone are among those heard here.

Un-Cabaret assembled the entire Emmy-winning writing staff of Sex and the City, each reading their own work for this special sold-out edition of Say the Word at The Knitting Factory in New York. Meet the writers behind the hit show and hear the individual voices that came together to create a cultural landmark.

Aaron Berg reads his best-selling book, Mr. Manners, to a live audience in Long Island City.