Max Darwin, the son of Washington street performers who exposed him to all kinds of theater and performance from infancy, became especially fascinated by magic.
Among his favorite jaunts with his parents were trips to Al’s Magic Store in D.C., where Al, a veteran in illusion, would teach him not only tricks but the trick of making an audience respond to them.
In college, he entertained his classmate with close magic, card tricks and the like. That led to him being hired to perform at a birthday party of one of his friend’s home.
The fee was a whopping $100, a fortune to a student. Darwin had to say “yes.”
Like the actor who says he can ride a horse, Darwin found himself in the position of having to invent a show. Manipulating cards in a cafeteria or dorm room is not the same as facing an audience of eager children who know you are the featured entertainment, Darwin says in a telephone conversation from outside Baltimore, where he was visiting his in-laws.
Darwin’s discovery was the delight of the audience.
“You remember the old television show, ‘Kids Say the Darnedest Things’ with Art Linkletter?” Darwin asks.
“Children, when you leave them to their own devices are remarkable at expressing what they say, think, and find interesting.”
Engaging children on that first professional outing taught Darwin to include his audience in the show. Perfecting that rapport with youngsters led to developing a show he thought he’s try out off-Broadway in New York for a few weeks.
“I rented a theater and four-walled it, doing everything to mount a show. I wanted to see what would happen. It could be a great folly that lasted a month or something that caught on.”
It caught on. Darwin’s show, “The Amazing Max” played off-Broadway continuously for 11 years.
Now it’s a staple of the road. Just as between his first backyard gig and his New York success, Darwin travels the U.S, with “The Amazing Max.”
On Saturday, Aug. 2, it comes to New Hope’s Bucks County Playhouse for two performances, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
“Among other things, a child will be levitated on the Bucks County stage,” Darwin says.
Our conversation keeps coming back to two things.
One is how realizing he can make children laugh gave him his approach to being The Amazing Max and producing shows.
“Children’s laughter is contagious. It motivated me from the beginning. I can make children laugh, and they make me laugh.”
The other is how Darwin doesn’t want to build a show so much for children, their parents begin looking at phones and watches while wondering what they’re doing in the theater with their child.
“Like a good Pixar movie,” Darwin says, “I entertain the children while making sure dialogue that might go over the children’s heads appeals to the adults, The children who participate in my show help because they are naturally funny.”
Because interacting with individual children is so much a part of what drives Darwin’s show, he says he never does the same show twice.
“Each performance is as unique as the children I talk to.”
Magic is only part of what Darwin does. He is also a working actor who appears regularly in several series, the latest being Hulu’s “Dying for Sex” opposite Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate.
“I was booked to play a hospital clown, and the part was expanded.”
Magic has combined with television numerous time as Darwin has worked as a magic consultant on National Geographic’s “Brain Games” and NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.”
“I instill the same attitude I bring to my act. Magic is not about tricks. It’s about creating drama, thrills, high energy and delight. That what’s I work to do and what the children help me do.”
Sad week with so many showbiz deaths
Just about every corner of show business, and especially music, were touched last week by eight notable deaths.
Perhaps the saddest, and by my observation, the most moving of the deaths was the drowning of Malcolm Jamal Warner in Costa Rica at age 54.
Social media was filled with several tributes to Warner. Many were emotional and spoke of how terrible people felt.
I think Warner’s death affected people more than others because he was young, his passing was unexpected, and because, in spite of having multiple credits as an adult actor, he is more often pictured as the child and teenager he was when he played the lone Huxtable son, Theo, on “The Cosby Show.”
Warner’s Theo followed in the line of Jerry Mathers’s Beaver or Ronny Howard’s Opie as being lovable in addition to being boyishly mischievous.
Connie Francis’ death at age 87 began a week in which grateful audiences said good-bye to major stars from several genres.
Even people who are not into heavy metal or aware of Black Sabbath knew Ozzy Osbourne, 76, as his persona and personalities transcended music and moved into popular culture.
Early metal bands, like Black Sabbath with Osbourne, had stronger musical artistry and wit than later ensembles.
Not only Osbourne, but his wife, Sharon, and daughter, Kelly, became known to the wider public.
I always enjoyed Sharon Osbourne’s observations when she was a panelist on “The Talk.”
They had the patina of coming from experience and common sense rather than being what the audience would want to hear.
In jazz, Chuck Mangione, 84, left his mark during decades of performing. I was lucky enough to see him at one the New Orleans Jazz Festivals I attended.
He was known for several standards, but his most famous was “Feels So Good,” which secured a rare high place on 1977 pop charts considering it was a instrumental jazz number.
Mangione was also a running character on the animated “King of the Hill,” about to be revived, where he voiced himself as the spokesperson for the Mega Lo Market in Arlen, Texas, the fictional town where the show was set.
“Feels So Good” featured prominently in these sequences.
The three deaths that affected me most were all nonagenarians, Tom Lehrer, 97; Alan Bergman, 99; and Cleo Laine, 97.
Lehrer was the most incisive in the last 75 years in writing original political and social satire.
Bergman, with his late wife, Marilyn, wrote some of the best songs of the last 50 years.
Laine was a consummate performer I must have seen about 50 times.
Laine from the first time I saw her, in an excerpt from a West End (London) production of “Show Boat,” in which she played the singer, Julie LaVerne, and did an amazing and moving rendition of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Bill.”
The next time I was in New York, I splurged for the London original cast album. After that, I haunted Laine concerts for years, all along the East Coast, first at Philadelphia’s Annenberg Center.
I rooted for her to receive the Tony for her, as usual, sultry delivery as Princess Puffer doing “The Wages of Sin” in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
With a five-octave range, Laine displayed range, wit, and the ability to sing anything from opera — Arnold Schoenberg even — to comic numbers.
She, and her late husband, jazz composer/performer John Dankworth were topnotch performers. Memories of their concerts, whether on Broadway or at Tanglewood, are indelible in my mind.
Alan and Marilyn Bergman were primarily lyricists. Songwriters today can learn a lot from the thematic cohesion and imagery in their compositions with composers ranging from Michel LeGrande to Marvin Hamlisch.
“Nice ’n’ Easy,” written for Frank Sinatra, “They Way We Were,” “What Are Doing the Rest of Your Life,” and “You Must Remember Spring” are Bergman tunes that are on my daily playlist.
I spoke once to Marilyn Bergman because jazz singer Tierney Sutton, in a conversation after one of her performances at Birdland, and I disagreed about the composer of a Bergmans’ song.
Tierney, who, I blush to say, would turn out to be right, said, “Why wonder?” picked up her phone, called the Bergmans, and let Marilyn settle it.
I must sing a Tom Lehrer song every day of my life, usually to illustrate how situations and events he satirized in song for television’s first, last, and only intelligent news commentary program, “That Was the Week That Was,” remain relevant today.
Just Thursday, I sang “Folk Song Army” to exemplify how have the better music doesn’t mean one is winning battles.
There’s also “National Brotherhood Week,” “Who’s Got the Bomb?” “The Vatican Rag,” “The Masochism Tango,” “Rickety Tickety Tin,” “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” and “Pollution” to keep one entertained by smart comedy with a palpable lump in its throat.
Oh, for just a fraction of Lehrer’s humor in today’s times of ranting and overstatement!
Coming back to Connie Francis, she may the first major singer of the rock ’n’ roll ballad.
While “Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Where The Boys Are” were mentioned a lot in stories about Francis’ passing, “Who’s Sorry Now?” Is the song that came to my mind.
The last death is an entertainer who made his name in sports, wrestling to be exact, before he became an actor and celebrity on and away from the mat.
Hulk Hogan, 71, was a presence during the nascent days of WWF, when exhibitions wresting really took off nationally.
Hogan was a constant presence on big and little screens and therefore a major ambassador for wrestling.
Channel 29’s new on-air personality
Morgan Parrish, who grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers in 2016, and considers Philadelphia her home territory, looks as if she’s gone market-to-market, station-to-station to arrive here in Philly as a newcomer to Channel 29’s “Good Day Philadelphia.”
Parrish’s most recent stop was Orlando, where she was the anchor of WOFL’s “Good Morning Orlando.”
The “Good Morning” paradigm means Parrish worked her way up through Fox television stations.
Before Orlando, she was at Fox’s Cincinnati station. Before that, she worked in Wilkes- Barre and began her career in Fargo, N.D.
‘Daily Show’ won’t go to Colbert
Last week, while musing randomly about where television’s strongest free agent Stephen Colbert might land, I mentioned Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” because I knew Jon Stewart’s contract was lapsing.
Between writing and publishing, I realized that though I was only riffing on Colbert’s possibilities, “The Daily Show” was off the list.
Mainly because Paramount owns Comedy Central the same way it owns CBS, the company that canceled Colbert’s “The Late Show.”
Stewart is indeed leaving “The Daily Show,” but Colbert will not be the beneficiary of that vacancy.
Last week, Comedy Central announced Stewart’s successor as host, Josh Johnson, a 34-year-old comedian who has been a correspondent and substitute host on the show. He was behind the show’s anchor desk on Tuesday.
Stage productions to see
A couple of local theater productions worth seeing are in their last week of performance.
“Little Shop of Horrors,” the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken musical at People’s Light in Malvern, goes about its lively, broadly comic business in a different way from most productions.
For one thing, it doesn’t use a puppet to portray the deadly proliferating plant, Audrey II, but features actor Chabrelle Williams, more elaborately festooned as the musical proceeds, peeking out from Audrey’s petals and leaves.
The color scheme is shiny magenta, and in several scene’s Williams’ character resembles a Ziegfeld mummer, especially as her lips are visible among Audrey’s fronds.
Good performances from Anna Faye Lieberman, Mary Elizabeth Scallen, Jessica Money, and Madeleine Garcia propel the production.
In Princeton, Nick Dear’s “Frankenstein” intelligently and movingly tells Mary Shelley’s timeless story from the Creature’s point of view.
Shunned and abandoned by its creator, Victor Frankenstein, who is proud of his achievement in animating the dead but ashamed and frightened by the monstrous being that results, the Creature roams Europe being rejected everywhere he goes.
Staged by Princeton Summer Theater, “Frankenstein” features a stellar performance by Lana Gaige, whose season of repertory work in general demonstrates the versatility and evolution of an actor.
Gaige, who also played a rangy teenager and Sherlock Holmes this summer, brings classical discipline to their role that makes one understand the Creature and knows its loneliness, frustration, humanity, and impetus for revenge.
Immediately following some of Princeton Summer Theater’s last performances of “Frankenstein,” audiences will hear jazz tones and be invited to stay for a cabaret show, “Voice Lessons” by talented, eclectic singer/actress Allison Spann.
Spann’s songlist ranges from Georges Bizet to John Kander and Fred Ebb and shows her reluctance to define herself as anything but a singer who loves and can sing all music.
It’s a comic look, she says, of her own adventures in building a career.
What a fascinating double header “Frankenstein” and “Voice Lessons” makes!
Source: Berkshire mont
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