"Freakishly knowledgeable" may not be the most flattering way to describe Larry Kassan’s relationship with the Twilight Zone, but I think even he’d agree: if the shoe fits…

Sure, sure, I could rattle off a long list of Larry’s professional credits and involvements in things like the Lake Placid Winter Olympics and an ABC TV special—but I’m naturally drawn to the most eccentric elements of a person, the better to draw a caricature, and an obsessive interest in a Binghamton-based science fiction universe takes the cake in Larry’s case—putting aside his claim that he may have the largest theater Playbill collection West of the Hudson.

(PS, Larry, I’m in the market for an original production Sweeney Todd playbill, as I have an unholy and freakish obsession with Angela Lansbury. Don’t judge.)

Larry can tell you what motivated Binghamton native Rod Serling to write the Twilight Zone: censorship of one of his scripts.  But even more than that, he can tell you the particular elements of that Rod Serling script that had been altered, how they originally played out, and how the TV sponsors demand that they be changed.

Star Trek fans got beat up in junior high for that kind of precision.  Don’t ask how I know that; it’s a tender spot.

But Larry’s love of the Zone has done a lot for Binghamton; he’s director of the Rod Serling Video Festival—a competition which brings entries and attention from all over the state—and now he’s instrumental in planning the TZ’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Honestly, there’s all sorts of different events to attend, including a TZ expert speaking engagement, a TZ bus tour, and the unveiling of a Rod Serling sculpture, but the one I’m most interested in—the one I think is the coolest—is this:

A live, televised reenactment of two Twilight episodes using local actors on WSKG. (10/3/09 @ 8 PM)

I mean, really, who does live TV anymore?  Yes, yes, there’s (the incredibly half-assed) Saturday Night Live, but it’s not clear whether anyone bothers to watch that show when there’s not a major election going on.

And THIS ONE is right here in Binghamton.

SO. COOL.  (I’m not being sarcastic. I know it’s hard to tell.)

Both episodes were “inspired by Binghamton locales” and will feature “professional, community and student actors”.  Looking for a place to enjoy the broadcast with other, uh… “Zonies”?  Um, “Twilighties”?  “T-Zoners”?  Whatever.  A special geek haven has been set up over at the Binghamton City Stage to enjoy the screening in a pseudo-social setting.

Larry Kassan ripped himself away from dusting his Playbill collection in order to answer a few of my questions…

OK, so you’re doing two episodes.  What are they about?
WSKG will broadcast two episodes live on Saturday evening October 3. MIRROR IMAGE is about a woman who sees herself in a bus station near Binghamton. WALKING DISTANCE is a biographical piece about a man, stressed by life, who finds himself travel back in time to his hometown where he meets himself as a young boy.
 
Now these scripts were supposedly inspired by Binghamton.  How so?
MIRROR IMAGE has many local Binghamton references and WALKING DISTANCE recreates Binghamton’s Recreation Park. Rod grew up just a few blocks away on Bennett Avenue.
 
Will the episodes be in black and white?
WSKG plans to broadcast the show in Black and White.
 
How are the actors prepping for the live telecast?
They are currently in rehearsal. Many have read about TZ and watched the actual episodes
 
So there are pros, community, and student actors.  Could you give us an example of each so we know who we’re looking at in the cast?
Hedi Weeks is a professional stage actor who has performed extensively in NYC and Toronto, Ava Crump is often seen at the Cidermill Playhouse, other cast members have connections to may community theatre around Greater Binghamton and two of the young actors are students at the Rod Serling School of the Arts. Austin Tanner, who plays the young Rod Serling was in last year’s production of OLIVER at the BHS Helen Foley Theatre.
 
I know you’ve had some contact with the Serling family; are they involved in this celebration at all?
The Serling family is most supportive of the celebration and plan to be at all of the events. 
 
Being the Twilight Zone encyclopedia you are, can you fill us in on a few lesser known “Bingo/Twilight connections”?
Rod always had strong ties to his hometown of Binghamton. He often added local references to all his scripts… Helen Foley (his drama teacher) was a character in the TZ, The Carousel shows up in many episodes, In the pilot which will be seen at the First Friday event he uses the name Resnick’s which was a famous women’s clothing store in downtown.
 
Some might note that being an inspiration for “The Twilight Zone” might not be the most FLATTERING of connections; what do you say to those people?
TZ was groundbreaking television, Serling was a pioneer in early broadcast TV. His work earned him more Emmy awards (6) than anyone in history of TV. This is something to celebrate and be proud of. I could say more but space does not allow.

There’s something about being from New York City that makes you pretend you’re impressed by absolutely nothing.  It’s true; I imagine it comes from years of watching mid-western tourists gawk up at 10 story buildings as if they never realized the atmosphere could support life at that height.

And when you’re from a Jersey suburb just outside the city (like me), the “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” attitude is magnified.  Because we’re all just trying to fit in with the uber-hip city folk.

But there’s something about Cirque du Soleil that crushes that instinct.  The old back-of-the-DVD-box cliché about “making you feel like a child again” actually applies: you get the sense that you’re seeing something truly fresh in which every moment is filled with the unexpected.  The amount of imagination and athleticism necessary to pull off a Cirque show boggles the mind:

These are people who take Olympic gymnasts, practice with them for weeks upon weeks, and then throw them off the show telling them that THEY’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE ACT.  The making of a Cirque show was documented in a 2003 reality series “Cirque du Soleil: Fire Within” which I was once forced to watch on a dreadful date that I’d prefer not to remember (only party because of the documentary).

Never seen a Cirque show?  It’s basically an artsy circus with live music.  All of the acts in the show are drawn together by a common theme (which nobody really understand but the artistic director) and the gymnasts involved do things with their bodies that surprise and delight the audience (but will probably cause them to spend thousands on physical therapists later in life).

Now HERE’S the confusing part.  The big touring arena version of Cirque: “Cirque du Soleil: Alegria”, played in Syracuse last week.  You can also check it out in State College (9/30), Rochester (9/23), or Philly (10/13) if you’re willing to make the road trip.  BUT there’s ANOTHER company doing Cirque-style shows in smaller theaters—and one of those tours will come to Binghamton on Feb 14th of next year: “Cirque Dreams: Illumination.”

So get it?  Big Cirque show was just in Syracuse.  Little Cirque show is coming to the Forum.  But they’re not connected.  Except in terms of style.

Now when Alegria came to Syracuse last week, the PR folks for the show gave me a ring and asked if I wanted to speak with artistic director Michael Smith.  I agreed, hoping and praying that he’d be really, really, really eccentric. He had a disappointingly firm grip on reality, but it was a fun interview nonetheless.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

PS, I STRONGLY recommend you check out the Broadway Theater League’s Cirque Dreams Illumination when it comes to Binghamton Feb 14th.  That and Avenue Q (Oct 18th) promise to be the most interesting shows of the season.

Yeah, OK, Melissa Etheridge is a gay icon.  And an environmental awareness icon.  And a breast cancer survivor icon.  And a rock chick icon.  And a songwriting icon.

Jesus Christ, Melissa, leave room for somebody else to have a cause, would ya?

But more than all of these things, she’s a brilliant live performer.  I had never known that till last night, and I suspect I’m not the only one who discovered it at the Anderson Center in Binghamton.  Well, OK, Vestal; but she said Binghamton.  “Are you ready to rock, Vestal?!?” doesn’t have the same ring…

See, what’s unique about going to a concert in the Bing is this: we get so damn few of them; we’re a lot more willing to go see a show from an artist that we maybe kinda liked just a little bit in college because their single was stuck in our broken CD player.  So Bing concerts are filled with the unconverted—not the hooting, hollering, crying, shrieking, (maybe even) tripping concert-goers you’d find in the “big city”.

It took me a while to realize this; beforehand, I just thought that we were all f*cking lame.  And I’m not convinced that some touring performers don’t feel that way when they show up here.

BTW, I heard one set of concert-goers last night scream at another set of concert-goers to sit down because they weren’t as excited about the show and they didn’t think that anybody else should be either.

On another BTW, I pretty much suck at listening to new music; what do you want from me?  I work in radio.  And if a lyric hasn’t been drilled into my head every four and a half hours before being used as the underscore for a Toyota commercial and the theme song for an Amy Adams romantic comedy, I have a difficult time sitting through its live performance.

But that’s what separates a really really really great live performer from, well, Britney Spears.  Because while we all want to have sex with Britney (even the gays; it’s OK, you can admit it), we pretty much just tolerate her singing on the off chance that she may lose her sh*t on stage and rip her clothes off for no particular reason.

This is not true for Melissa Etheridge.  (OK, maybe it’s true for some of the lesbians reading.)  I, for one, am not sure quite why I liked her live show so much last night.  More than 70% of the show was tunes I didn’t know.  But it didn’t matter.  It might have been her voice—which was in perfect form and didn’t sound any different from what you’d hear in a studio recording.  It might have been her laid-back vibe: you felt like she could have been playing a bar as small as Frankie’s or a space as big as the Broome Arena, she’d be having a ball either way.  I actually think, more than anything else, it was her chemistry with the audience.

She’s an engaging storyteller, and every lyric seemed vitally important when delivered live.  Message songs like “I Run for Life” (her breast cancer anthem) and “I Need to Wake Up” (her Oscar-winning environmental anthem) which before seemed to me like “charity jingles” when they first came out, suddenly just worked.  It’s impossible to deny that’s she’s genuine when you see her in the flesh.

I can’t tell you for sure if I’ll buy Melissa’s next album—I’ve never been blown away by her CDs; but I can tell you I won’t miss her next concert.  Unless Britney Spears is in town.  And having a breakdown.  Half-naked.

Now that’s entertainment.

PS: We interviewed Melissa on the Star Morning Show.  She was just as cool to speak to by phone as she was live in concert.

CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

Artsy people aren’t always good at pimping their s@%t.  So that’s why it’s nice to see the KNOW Theater (Caroll Street, Binghamton) working their marketing machine as hard as their method acting.  KNOW’s dedicated themselves to producing less commercial theater.  And if you think it’s tough getting people to live theater in general, just imagine what it’s like when you don’t have some old Andrew Lloyd Webber shriek-fest to cart out of the cobwebs when money gets tight.

No, you’ll definitely see some more “interesting” fare at KNOW.  And that’s why they have to get so creative when it comes to getting noticed.  They know how to do it low-budget marketing.  And they know how to do it on the web.

Take their latest show: The Two of You.  It’s a play that was first produced at the Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca about a well-to-do social-climbing couple living in Boston during the 1950s.  They’re just going about their business when a girl shows up at their front door claiming to be the husband’s daughter.  The girl’s name is January Aloha Ireland.  Congratulations; you now know the sum total of everything I know about the plot of the play.

But here’s where the KNOW folks get clever.   Rather then run some lame-ass marketing campaign, they’ve decided to create posters advertising January’s search for her father.  “Do you know Hank?” they ask, in bold letters across the top.  “Hey! My name is January Aloha Ireland.  I’m in town trying to find my father Hank.  He doesn’t know about me yet…” And so on.

The posters use pics of the actual actors—further blurring the line between reality and theatrics.  And they haven’t stopped with posters.  January’s got her own Facebook, and she’s friending the hell out of everybody in Binghamton.  Check out her current status “I met this opera singer guy Matt who said I should be using Facebook to help in my search, he suggested I friend you if you don’t already know me. Visit my blog http://doyouknowhank.blogspot.com/”.

Go to the blog and you’ll find even more of the story—a journal of January’s quest to find her dad.  The campaign’s so cool, I’m starting to worry that the play will be a let down.  So I tracked down the Artistic Director of KNOW to find out more…

I know you’re being a bit secretive about the ad campaign for “The Two of You”.  But tell us as much as you can (without having to kill us afterwards).
We are taking the story to the street and internet in a way no one in this town (or possibly anywhere) has done before.  At KNOW Theatre we, maybe I should speak for myself, I don’t see these people as characters, I see them as people.  I don’t see theatre as “a cute play”  I see it as an event.  I see people with a back story, with a life that could exist somewhere else besides on the stage.  We’ll call this idea a convention.  If we accept different types of theatre may open up different conventions than what we’re used to on a stage, the possibilities are endless.  In this case it just happens that in my mind, the characters are currently alive and well.  And although everything they do off stage may not agree with what they do onstage, it still makes things interesting and opens up a wide range of possibilities for advertising.

So you’re obviously thinking outside the box in terms of advertising your next show.  But I’m told the writing of the show itself is kind of “outside the box”.  How so?
When a new play is written, it is often taken to a workshop where other writers and audience members give feedback and help the playwright perfect his work.  Theatre also has an un-written list of conventions.  For instance one character may talk to the audience to tell their story, as in Glass Menagerie, but no one else on stage does and no one else is aware that “Character A” is conversing with the audience.  For this show, all the typical conventions are blown out of the water.  Everything is fair game.  The playwright has acknowledged in his work that this is a show being performed post workshop and it becomes clear things are maybe not perfect yet in some minds.

If you had to describe the plot in say, 25 words, how would you do it.  Use more and you get a penalty.  I’m serious.  I only pay for so much disk drive space on BingPop.
Husband, Wife, girl enters via elevator.  Surprise!  Where was he 21 years and 9 months ago?  Living in the 80’s…friends with benefits…unexpected results.

How’s the campaign working so far?  Have people actually bought into the idea that this girl’s looking for her dad? 
Depends what you mean by “bought into the idea”.  Are people helping January find her dad, yes.  She has a growing following on Facebook (search her by e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and she’s started a Twitter and YouTube account.  You can also check out her website at http://www.DoYouKNOWHank.com I’ll tell you a little secret, we haven’t announced it yet, but in about a week, KNOW Theatre is going to officially join in the search and open our e-mail list to her.  I feel for the poor girl.  As for the public, one of my students saw the poster and offered to have his father, a cop, do a background search and see what he could come up with.  Something told me that was not a good idea, and some poor guy named Hank pulled over on 81 might have a hard time explaining, so we passed on that.  But generally people have been very supportive, a little confused, but lets face it, finding ones biological parent(s) isn’t always simple or easy. 

If people are going to see a show at the KNOW Theatre for the first time, what’s the one thing you’d want them to walk away saying, if nothing else?
Wow!  That was better than some of the off-Broadway shows I’ve seen!  (We already hear that, we just like to hear it repeated)

When you plan a new show that’s a little less traditional, do you get any pushback—any “nobody will come to see that”?  If so, how do you respond?
Sometimes.  Many theatres are stuck in a place where they have to sell large numbers of tickets to keep the doors open.  Luckily, we can afford to take risks here and there.  We’re not out to produce every controversial, cutting edge play ever written.  We just feel like sometimes there are shows that haven’t been given a fair chance, and we want to breathe life into them so the people of the Bing can make their own conclusions.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine inside the mind of a man who slits people’s throats and bakes them into meat pies—just ‘cuz.  But it sure makes for a fun little ditty.

Musical theater composer/genius Stephen Sondheim (“Sweeney Todd”) is loved by many people for many reasons.  But this is why I love him; he can write a song from the perspective of just about anybody.  Guy murders a judge and chops up his body before shoving him into an oven?  Let’s write a song about it!  Madmen bond over shooting an American President dead (as in “Assassins”)?  Let’s write a song about it.  Skeezy fairy tale wolf date-rapes teenage girl only moments after doing the same to her grandmother (as in “Into the Woods”)?  Do I hear violins?

I’ll take a moment for those of who didn’t actually get what was going on during “Into the Woods” to absorb that last revelation…

And yet, for all these songs, nobody once accuses Sondheim of tastelessness.  That’s art, I suppose.  But of course, it all has greater meaning—and says something worthwhile about life.  And those who don’t get that are the same folks who probably didn’t realize that the Wolf in Into the Woods (whose costume in the Broadway production literally had giant fake genetalia) was making sexual advances towards Little Red Riding Hood.  Like the Mom and Dad who happily let their kids belt out the new Lady Gaga single “Poker Face” without detecting the fairly blatant sexual innuendos, they’re better off not knowing; and the rest of us are better off not having them know.

Because those people aren’t going to appreciate Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” when it makes its way to the Forum Theater on April 18th anyway.  Todd is the tale of a man so disgusted with the complacency and corruption he finds in London that life loses all value for him.  He begins killing at random; and then disposes of the bodies by giving them to the baker downstairs (Mrs. Lovett) who finds that they make tastier meat pies than the pussy-cats being used down the street.  Todd’s quest becomes one of revenge when he finds the man responsible for death of his wife—but that doesn’t stop him from offing a few other people along the way—just for sport.

If you don’t know Sweeney Todd—you may be missing one very important piece of information: The show is FUNNY.  Hysterical, in fact.  Part of its success lies in the fact that Sondheim is able to balance the dark comedy with some pretty serious characters.  Mrs. Lovett, for example, is so in love with who Todd was BEFORE going mad that she can’t even bring herself to realize who he’s become.

At least, that’s the analysis from Carrie Cimma, the actress who plays Lovett in the National Tour that will stop in here on April 18th.  She took some time away from baking priests, mimes, and fops into meat pies in order to fill us in about what we’re going to see…

So in this version of Sweeney, the actors play their own instruments… how good were you REALLY with the stuff you have to play before you started rehearsing?
I was trained primarily on saxophone, but I also play a little piano, guitar and trumpet.  So learning the tuba was really just a matter of remembering how to read the clef it plays in, and adjusting to a different size mouthpiece.  The triangle was much easier!  It was the memorization that was really the most difficult part, even on the easier instruments.  Rarely are professional musicians asked to memorize this much music at one go, so it was a challenge for m e, being an actor first.
 
I’m sure you’ve heard a ton of other actresses sing this part on cast recordings–maybe seen it live.  How do you avoid doing the same old thing with Lovett?
 I was working out of town when the revival played in New York, and was only vaguely familiar with the Lansbury 1979 version.  So I think it was a blessing that I kind of had to start from scratch.  That gave me the opportunity to do EVERYTHING fresh without any preconceived notions of what it "should" be.  The director and producers were really wonderful in letting me experiment and try new things.  I don’t think she’s necessarily an "old" lady, so i tried to keep her light and young and funny.  That’s the heartbreak of this character really; she does what she needs to do to survive, and is very witty and charming, but makes some terrible choices.  She really needs to be someone the audience identifies with, that keeps people on her side.  Then when she comes to the end of her story, it’s that much more devastating. 
 
Sweeney Todd’s a bit of a nut; I always wonder what Lovett SEES in Sweeney?  What’s it for you?
I think she’s fixated on the version of Benjamin Barker she remembers from 15 years ago.  Back then, he was probably young and handsome, charming and friendly.  She’s had that person in her head for all this time, and his transformation into this obsessive madman kind of flies under her radar.  It’s that whole "love is blind" thing.  Also, when she has been ruminating on this one person for so long, losing that obsession is almost worse than losing the actual person or the relationship.
 
Have you ever actually HAD a meat pie?
Yes.  I’m not such a fan.  I’ve never really liked pie crust.  I like to eat all the filling out of pecan pie and feed the crust to the dog.
 
One made of a pussy-cat?
I own a cat, so no!  His name is Bisquit, and that’s about as close as I get to the cat/food connection.
 
OK, now the dirt; One of the fun things about having the tours come through is seeing them out after the show.  Who in the cast are we most likely to end up doing a shot with before you leave town?
Well, Binghamton is our closing city, so probably all of us!!  I have to take really good care of myself for this show, so I haven’t been drinking while touring.  But when it’s over, I think I might have a whiskey or two.  Or three.
 
You don’t have to make any enemies by telling us the crappiest place you’ve visited on tour; but you DO have to tell us why it sucked so much…
It’s always hard when we’re staying away from the area the theater is in.  Sometimes we’re out by the highway, next to a Waffle House (which is delicious) and you have to take your life in your hands by running across the four lane highway to get to the gas station to get a coffee.  A lot of places we’ve been are not very pedestrian friendly, so it’s like a dangerous game of Red Rover.

OK, look, I’ve kept it in long enough.  I just need to come right out and say it: I have an unnatural obsession with Angela Lansbury.

Yes, Angela Lansbury; the 84-year old Academy Award winning star of the Manchurian Candidate and (MORE IMPORTANTLY) the fine actress who portrayed singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the masterpiece musical Beauty and the Beast.  But that’s not really the root of my obsession…

It all began when I was very young.  I tried to hide from it.  Tried to redirect my interest into something normal.  The Hardy Boys or Edgar Allen Poe.  But they just wouldn’t do.  It would all come back to that small town of Cabot Cove, Maine, where bestselling novelist Jessica B Fletcher (played by Lansbury) would unleash an unintentional trail of homicidal carnage in her literary wake.  That’s right, week after week on Murder She Wrote, a local resident would inexplicably die and Angela would come to the rescue—noting that the killer was clearly LEFT-handed based on the angle of entry and therefore the suspect Sheriff Tupper had in custody couldn’t POSSIBLY be the real killer.

But it wasn’t JUST Fletcher.  It was really just any ludicrously unlikely detective.  In 1987, NBC created the Father Dowling Mysteries—in which a Catholic Priest and a streetwise nun worked to keep slime balls off the streets of Chicago.  And before that, the Great Mouse Detective rocked my world.  If there were a potted plant that knew how to uncover insurance fraud, I’d own the DVD box set.

So when I tell you about the “Underwood Estates Wine Murder Mystery” this Sunday at Antonio’s Café—you’ll understand why I’m excited.  Normally, I’m a theater snob—and the idea of dinner (or in this case brunch) theater makes me want to gag on a chicken parmesan.  But as far as I’m concerned, with murder mysteries, the campier the better.

Bring on the ailing old millionaire, the scheming butler, the money-hungry young nephews trying to get a glance of their uncle’s will.  If an over-the-top European inspector enters with a muddy accent: all the better.  And let him have a magnifying glass—oh please, let him have a magnifying glass.  And a fake suicide note.  And a skeleton key.

Let there be all these things; and I will be there.  Munching on Antonio’s brunch of pasta, meatballs, and chicken cutlets.  (And BTW, there’s a cash bar; because any great interactive murder mystery brunch is best when enjoyed with a fine White Zinfandel.)  If you’re feeling super-ambitious, Antonio is still looking for actors; e-mail him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .  The whole thing is hosted by “DJ John Adams”—which, BTW, is an excellent DJ name—-major “founding father cred”.
 
PS: Antonio has the best gelato is greater Binghamton.  Save room.

Word from the folks at BU is that Jon Stewart is ALMOST sold out.  They wouldn’t share any numbers–but I’m going to assume they’re not playing the "if we say we’re almost sold out, it’ll spur sales" card.  Buy your tickets soon–or be crushed by regret as the rest of us laugh at your self-imposed misery.