Hope over her breakup with Liam. By Jacqueline Cutler learned the baby is a Days of our Lives Tribune Media Services girl. Madison thought she EJ learned Brady ofhad a great idea for Fu- fered Taylor a job and All My Children sion. demanded that she not All the guests at Cara’s take it. Stefano tried to bridal shower saw the The Bold and the figure out if the mindvideo. Jake caught Grif- Beautiful fin going through mediAmber gave Bill the big- erasing drug worked or if Rafe was faking cal supplies, but Griffin gest surprise of his life. his amnesia. Melanie diverted the conversaDonna and Justin badtold her mother she tion, chatting about how mouthed Amber, but understood why Carly happy he was to attend Marcus stuck up for her. gave her up at birth. his sister’s wedding. Donna tried to warn Ka- No longer a cop, Hope While Tad and Cara retie about Bill. The wrong was at loose ends. Fay cited their vows, Agent arrived in Salem and Kaye saw Amanda drink- person got the dirt on told Nicole and Taylor ing alone at the bar and Thomas and Brooke’s she had a heart condigot her to open up. Scott kiss. Thomas posed a puzzling question to tion that could be fatal. arranged for Madison’s Brooke. Oliver seized a sonogram, and the two Taking Maggie’s advice, were happy as they moment while comforting Jennifer left a message
SOAP SYNOPSES
for Jack and told him he ripped out her heart. General Hospital Brenda tried to escape, but Theo dragged her back to the cave. Siobhan was notified that she would be deported. Though Brenda insisted her baby was stillborn, Theo was not buying her story. Jax freaked out when he discovered Carly tending to Shawn’s wounds. Jason was distressed to discover he was a character in Spinelli’s novel. Theo injected Brenda with a deadly neurotoxin and left her for dead as Sonny, Jason
and Dante burst into his hideout. One Life to Live Tea duped Natalie and took the baby from her. Bo was stonewalled at the Moroccan prison, where Rex showed up and got them into David’s mysteriously empty cell. Matthew told Destiny his parents’ belief that Clint killed Eddie. Finding John alone, Kelly told him he needed to find a way, besides drinking, to deal with his pain. They fell into each other’s arms. James, trying to avoid Tess, wound up having yet another uncomfortable encounter with her while he was
naked, and Starr walked in. The Young and the Restless Victor told the district attorney that Skye fell into the volcano and Sharon tried to save her. When Sharon returned home, she was shocked to find Adam’s things gone. He left because of the deal Nick offered Adam to stay away from Faith. Adam’s cell phone was disconnected, and he stopped using his credit cards. Adam went so far off the grid he wound up in a bar in Thailand and found himself next to Koa.
COVER STORY
Pee-wee Herman’s zany romp on Broadway makes it to HBO By Jacqueline Cutler © Zap2it It all starts with the voice. Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-wee Herman, created that voice that sounds heliuminduced back in his school days. Now it has taken him to an HBO special, “The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway,” airing Saturday, March 19. While driving to an editing room to put the final touches on the special, Reubens recalls creating Pee-wee for a sketch he did with The Groundlings, the improv troupe, in 1977. “The voice came from a play many, many years prior to that,” Reubens says. “I was the second-oldest kid in a repertory production of ‘Life With Father.’ I inadvertently changed from a normal, acceptable voice that would have worked for that show to a cartoony voice that became Pee-wee Herman’s voice.” Since Reubens had not yet finished editing the special, a review copy was not available at this writing. But it’s based on the “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which ran 80 performances on Broadway late last year and turned the Stephen Sondheim Theatre into his wacky playhouse. The stage show was based on his 1986-91 Saturday morning TV series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” It was great fun, and “fun” was his secret word of the day. Each time it was said the audience had to get loud and silly, and it was impossible to sit in that theater and not laugh.
Ultimately silly is what it’s about. There’s pretty much no other way to describe the colorful, zany world that is his playhouse. Pee-wee’s pals show up: Cowboy Curtis (Phil LaMarr) in his purple chaps and Jheri curls; Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart) in her enormous bouffant; King of Cartoons (Lance Roberts) in his regal garb; and Mailman Mike (John Moody), as angry as ever. Though the show has all of the “Playhouse” TV show trappings, its double entendres give it a more adult sensibility. Pee-wee wears what looks like a wedding band, and a running joke is that it’s his abstinence ring, a nod to his 1991 arrest in a Sarasota, Fla., porn theater. And therein is the big lesson, Reubens says. “I feel like, in a certain way, one of the things always attractive to me was to show kids that anything is possible,” he says. “If your aspirations are big, reach for the stars sort of thing. This show illustrates that — me being on Broadway in a show that is being filmed for Home Box Office was almost an impossibility a few years ago. “I am a good example of that anything is possible — don’t count anybody out,” he continues. “What I try to achieve in the show is to do something old-fashioned, and it is just pure entertainment. I don’t want to say it is a piece of fluff. It is just there to be fun and funny and make you feel good.” In the play, Pee-wee is about to have his playhouse wired for a computer, and his friends worry
Paul Reubens stars in “The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway” Saturday on HBO. that if he goes online he won’t spend much time with them anymore. Some terrific 1950sera black-and-white school films are shown, and as important as hygiene and etiquette are, the film about being well-mannered and washing hands frequently is hilarious. The Broadway audience, at least on one night in December, was made up of hipsters who cheered Jambi (John Paragon), and just the sight of Chairry, the big fuzzy blue chair, and Globey, the globe with Mel Brooks’ visage, made people happy. “In New York City, we had between 100 and 300 almost every night, waiting in the freezing cold weather 20 or 30 minutes for me to come out at the stage door,” Reubens says. “I was all over New York City one day in the Pee-wee suit. I talked to fans, of all 80 performances, after the show. I have a good feel for how people were reacting.”
About that Pee-wee suit — it’s not plain gray as it appears, but glen plaid. Isaac Mizrahi came to see the play and liked the suit, Reubens says. Other famous audience members included Elvis Costello, who went with his wife, jazz singer Diana Krall. Simon and Garfunkel attended — though separately, Reubens notes. Prince saw the show, as did David Bowie and his wife, Iman. The theatergoing duo that most intrigued Reubens was Salman Rushdie and Lou Reed. Reubens looks fairly unchanged since the ’80s, still slim and bopping about the stage. Though there are actors who spend their youths priming to be on Broadway, he was not among them. “In a certain way it was probably more extreme than had I been the person my whole life aspiring to this,” he says. As a veteran of TV, Reubens thought he was accustomed to long hours, but the grind of eight shows a week surprised him. “This is so much more work than I thought it would be,” he says. “I was shocked by just how hard it was to do that many shows, and rewriting it.” Reubens was rewriting the show up until the curtain rose. Given that Pee-wee has been a part of him for so long but had been retired for a while, why revisit the man-child and his famous “heh-heh” now? “I woke up one day and thought, ‘This is it,’ ” Reubens says. “ ‘This is the time.’ ”
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Solution Emily Procter MARCH 13 - 19, 2011 – BRAINERD, MN/DISPATCH – 11