It's
difficult knowing what to make of Who Loves Ya, Baby?: The Songs of Telly
Savalas a sort of
play-cum-lounge act that endeavors to give us the posthumous spirit of Telly
Savalas, singing the songs he
recorded and waxing philosophical about manhood; the joke of course being that
he wasn't a singer but an idiosyncratic character actor who turned his burly
frame, bald head and signature growl into icons of leading man masculinity when
for half a decade he immortalized the role of NYC police Lieutenant Theo Kojak on television. But he was a fellow given to
extravagant gesture, and like other unlikely pop culture icons of the period
who had no business singing—Burt Reynolds and Bill Cosby to name
two—he thought he could persona his way through a few record dates and
nightclub appearances, crooning.
Now
in a way, the hubris of this is risible, to say the least, but there are two
factors to consider before trying to harness it for parody. The first is the
degree of self-parody already intrinsic to it; one has but to see YouTube clips
of Telly doing his extracurricular musical thing to understand that its
silliness speaks for itself. The second is that, even within the
hipness-challenged context of certain popular media of the ‘70s, struggling to
come to grips with new vocabularies—during that weird transitional decade
that bridged the counterculture revolutions of the ‘60s and the integration of
their more permanent achievements and consequences into the mainstream of the
‘80s—there’s a degree to which Savalas has to have been in on his own
joke.
But
in Who Loves Ya, Baby? directed
by Taylor Negron and written
by Hunter Nelson, actor Tom
DiMenna, though a
more-than-passable Savalas-surrogate for such an evening (though nowhere near
the “channeler” that Frank Gorshin was as George Burns in Good Night, Gracie), seems
caught between an SCTV style
parody of persona and a genuine homage. Clearly too, the creators (I include
the actor in this) have something serious in mind as a subtext: the loss of
iconic pop-culture role models who can demonstrate to future generations of
American males what it is “to be a man.” (The fictional Telly makes the amusing
observation that the only actor on TV currently carrying the
persona-as-measure-of-coolness torch is David Caruso—and love Caruso or
hate him, never mind what you feel about his implicit “teachings,” the comment
is weirdly truer than not.) But then the question becomes, how much do the
creators see self-delusion as part of the formula? Nowhere does the schism in
the show’s approach become more pronounced than in its depiction of Savalas’s
actor brother George (who played Detective Stavros on Kojak and for the first season or two was billed as
Demonsthenes, rather than as himself). George was an avuncular, overweight
character man with a limited palate but, countering that, the authenticity of
who he was. George, also from the afterlife, makes a cameo appearance in the
show (I cannot find my program and I cannot seem to locate the actor’s name
online, but perhaps that’s just as well) and he’s as far from evoking George as
Dimenna is close to evoking Telly; he’s palpably a skinny actor in a fat suit,
playing brother-as-sycophant. And it shreds the illusion which is tenuous
enough.
I
don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking about it too much. It’s all meant as lightweight
and frothy. And it is, and it’s even entertaining—modestly, to my taste.
But I grew up watching guys like Savalas (my personal icon was Robert Culp in I
Spy). And while the whole subject
is rife for both parody and social
comment intertwined, I think there’s a finer balance to be achieved than the
one that’s currently at the SoHo playhouse. And zappa-doo, like that…
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