Word: gelbart
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Book by Larry Gelbart...
...beckoning for comfort, on the detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed...
MASTERGATE. The President dozes away his afternoons. A paranoid National Security Adviser travels by Stealth bomber. The true head of Government is a secretive CIA director who also happens to be dead. Larry Gelbart's fiercely funny Broadway satire lampoons events that made the evening news the sharpest comedy on TV. Joseph Daly is a dead-on George Bush, and the dialogue is an S.J. Perelmanesque stream -- debased, obfuscatory and unconsciously self- condemning. Samples: "I wonder if I might ask the Senator to stop raking over dead horses"; "What did the President know, and does he have any idea that...
...danger of something being performed live is that "mistakes can be made." Real life does not always come out as perfectly as a script. Unfortunately for the witnesses of the Iran-Contra hearings Gelbart's script for Mastergate was never made available to them...
Then again, Gelbart received a great deal of help. He based much of his script on transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings and from Watergate events. The transcripts, of course, might be considered funny in themselves. But Gelbart amplifies the circuitous and consistently evasive discourse of today's politicians by writing in what he calls "half-speak," a play on Orwell's double-speak. A perfect example of half-speak comes when key witness Steward Butler (Harry S. Murphy) says (or rather, doesn't say), "I can only reiterate what I've repeated before...