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The top albums chart for the week is a mix of the old and the new.
New is number 1– “Dawn FM” from The Weeknd sold 154,000 copies, the bulk of them from streaming. “Dawn FM” sold only 14,739 paid downloads and CDs. Yikes.
Adele’s “30” dropped to number 4 and sold a total of 46,000 copies, but 19,288 were a mix of CDs, LPs, and downloads. So she actually wins.
But then again. The Weekend also sold 36,000 streaming equivalent copies of his greatest hits. So maybe he wins.
Then there’s Morgan Wallen, who managed to unload 42,322 of his “Dangerous” double album. Doesn’t everyone in the world have this thing already? And is no one embarrassed buying it, all things considered? Evidently not. Plus Wallen sold 13,000 copies of his previous album. So maybe he won.
But the real winner was Fleetwood Mac, a group I read about from the 70s. Their 1977 album. “Rumours,” won’t go away. It sold almost 16K copies, nearly two thirds streaming equivalent. Go figure. This thing was the bane of my existence in 1977 when Elvis Costello, the Ramones, the Clash, The Jam, Talking Heads, and Blondie were trying to kick its ass. It took Michael Jackson in 1979 with “Off the Wall” to do the trick. And now it’s back! Why? It must be discounted down to like 3 bucks or something. Who knows?
Unless she’s a superwoman, you won’t be seeing Cecily Strong on “Saturday Night Live” tonight. From now through February 6th she’s performing a one woman, many dozens of characters play at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
No one but Lily Tomlin has ever appeared before in Jane Wagner’s “The Search of Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Wagner, who is a comic genius, is also Tomlin’s lifelong partner, and they crafted the show to fit the gifted actress and comedienne — Just as they crafted her earlier Broadway show and touring piece that I saw in 1977.
“The Search” took off in 1985 and was revived many times. Some times I cringed because there were dated references. But for this new edition, Wagner has cleaned it up and moved it into 2021. Why not? “The Search” was always a modern piece about the universe, the cosmos, existence, and quantum theory. So the digital age is its natural home. Talk of algorhythms controlling our lives has never made more sense.
Cecily Strong seemed when announced to be a perfect choice to take the baton from Tomlin. She’s not as wily and subversive, but her “SNL” work has shown a diverse array of work. She doesn’t disappoint as she guides us through all the characters. (Some of the original character, like Mrs. Beasley, have been edited from this version, which was trimmed down to 90 minutes without intermission. I miss them. But you can’t have everything.)
The main character is Trudy, a homeless woman who’s in touch with outer space. The world is much more PC now about the homeless, but Wagner and Tomlin always appreciated with great warmth the idea of these mentally detached others roaming around, making sense to themselves if not the larger world. Really, come to my neighborhood and I can introduce you to a lot of Trudy’s. Strong infuses hers with love and dignity, but also an out there sense of humor that turns out to be maybe more ‘with it’ than you’d imagine.
“The Search” is full of wonderfully profound one liners, all of which Strong landed with big and knowing laughs. Some of them are: “I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. I can take it in small doses, but as a lifestyle, I found it too confining. It was just too needful; it expected me to be there for it all the time, and with all I have to do–I had to let something go.”
Another one: “All my life, I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.”
The audience at The Shed (a beautiful new industrial type theater, well ventilated, and not virus-terrifying at all), on the night I went, was mostly youngish, and probably there as “SNL” fans. That’s ironic, since Tomlin — a graduate of “Laugh In,” was a revered comic when she hosted that show in 1975, 1976, and ’83. (I wish they’d have her back now.) The audience may not have been familiar with the material, so their laughs seemed to be punctuations after listening intently to the unusually rich and deep wordiness of Wagner’s monologues. This is not the way things are written now for a dumbed down audience. But they got it. And for someone like me, there from the beginning, “The Search” with Cecily Strong was a total pleasure.
So we’ll miss Cecily on “SNL” for a bit, but if you’re in New York, and you can get a ticket, you’ll get to have a throwback moment of live performance. “The Search” is on, and there are many great discoveries.
PS I met some people after the show who actually had an umbrella hat, Trudy’s signature piece of clothing. They said they bought it on amazon. The Shed should have really purchased some and stamped their logo on them with the show’s name. That’s a missed opportunity!
For Neve Campbell, this is a real “Party of Five.”
The fifth edition of “Scream” scared up $10 million on Friday night. Adding that to the $3.5 million from Thursday previews, “Scream,” titled the same as the original “Scream” in 1996, will shoot for a $40 million weekend.
Paramount, which hasn’t had a hit (or a release, really) since “A Quiet Place, Part 2,” needs this like a French foreign legion soldier needs water in the desert. (They did have “Clifford the Big Red Dog” and “PAW Patrol,” but you know what I mean.)
Now, they’re back in business, which will include two Tom Cruise blockbusters this year.
So you scream, we scream, we all scream for “Scream 5.” Oh, and that Neve Campbell reference: before you were born she was in a TV series called “Party of Five” with Matthew Fox, who was subsequently eaten by the smoke monster (long story).
Evert’s sister died in February 2020 from ovarian cancer, so this is very alarming.
McKendry writes:
Chris Evert has been diagnosed with stage 1C ovarian cancer. It’s in an early stage, discovered following a preventive hysterectomy. Cancer has not been detected elsewhere in her body. This week, she began her first of six rounds of chemotherapy.
With time for some perspective, she says, “I’ve lived a very charmed life. Now I have some challenges ahead of me. But, I have comfort in knowing the chemotherapy is to ensure that cancer does not come back.”
But rightfully, she is a bit nervous.
“As someone who has always had control over my life, I have no idea how I’ll respond to chemotherapy,” Chrissie says. “I have to give in to something higher.”
Read the article. Chrissie’s prognosis is encouraging. Sending her lots of good luck wishes.
CBS’s “Ghosts” is the story. A not great sitcom that has somehow picked up steam at 9pm off the success of viewers tuned into “Young Sheldon” at 8pm. Those viewers dip with “United States of Al” at 8:30pm– one of those shows you can’t believe is on TV– and they come roaring back at 9pm. Go figure.
Last night, “Young Sheldon” scored a 7.7 million, “Al” dropped down to 5.5, and then “Ghosts” came back with 6.5 million. Compare those numbers to ABC’s wan comedy group on Wednesday nights, where 3 million is the average.
Among scripted dramas, “SVU” is the king. The “Law & Order” show benefited last night also from the absence of competitor “Grey’s Anatomy.” The latter show was on hiatus for COVID, which is ironic since last year all they did in the show was battle COVID. (I guess the hospital setting isn’t real after all.) “SVU did a very nice 4.2 million last night with a .66 in the key demo. This is why they’ll get to Season 25 no problem.
NBC, stuck because of the “Manifest” debacle, doesn’t know what to do at 8pm, so they run “Blacklist,” also a show only watched by pets and coma patients. Remember the days when you’d get at least two good comedies at 8pm-9pm on NBC Thursdays?
No one at Dick Wolf or NBC seems to get that “SVU” success doesn’t translate into “Organized Crime” numbers. The second show dropped by a million viewers at 10pm. “Organized Crime” is impenetrable. Chris Meloni is fine, but there’s no show, just a lot of whining about Stabler’s dead wife, and Dylan McDermott as Sinatra Jr. If they would just develop a “Law & Order” show out of it, the numbers might rise.
“Jeopardy” is no longer in ratings jeopardy. And it’s all thanks to Amy Schneider.
Schneider won her 32nd straight game on Thursday night, and she is now tied for third place with James Holzhauer for the number of consecutive games won.
But for the last week of 2020, “Jeopardy!” scored 5.4 million viewers with Schneider, and topped “Family Feud” for the number 1 syndicated game show. And the number 1 syndicated show overall.
Schneider’s first game was on November 17. She’s won $1,101,600 and is the highest earning female contestant in “Jeopardy!” history. Schneider is now $417,001 away from overtaking Matt Amodio’s third-place spot for highest regular season play winnings, and only six games away from tying Amodio’s second-place streak of 38 games. But she’s far away from beating show host Ken Jennings’ record of $2,520,700 over 74 games.
Schneider, by the way, is the first transgender person to play or win “Jeopardy!”
On Twitter this fall, Schneider wrote: “The fact is, I don’t actually think about being trans all that often, and so when appearing on national television, I wanted to represent that part of my identity accurately: as important, but also relatively minor. But I also didn’t want it to seem as if it was some kind of shameful secret. While it’s gratifying to know that people didn’t necessarily know I was trans until they read about it, I do want people to know that aspect of me. I think being trans is really cool!”
The new “Scream” movie scored $3.5 million on Thursday night in previews. That’s a big number and it points to a huge weekend.
This is the fifth “Scream,” the first since 2011. The other four were all hits even if the last couple of them were weak sequels.
But let’s not forget the story of “Scream.” The first one was in 1996 and was so big that the sequel came the next year, no waiting. The third one was in 2000. And despite the fact that Wes Craven directed them, and Kevin Williamson wrote the first two, it was Bob and Harvey Weinstein who produced them, distributed them, and made them popular.
Indeed, “Scream” — which Bob Weinstein made under the Dimension banner at Miramax — made so much money that Harvey used to joke that was how he got to make his artier Oscar winning films. “Scream” also put Dimension Films on the map, putting the division in a position to create many other hits including four “Scary Movie” installments, the “Spy Kids” films, and even the award winning “The Others” starring Nicole Kidman.
Everyone hates the Weinsteins now, and Harvey’s in prison for 23 years unless he gets out on appeal, which seems unlikely but you never know. Still, history can’t be rewritten. If “Scream 5” turns out to be the monster hit of the weekend. the success reaches back to the halcyon days of Miramax/Dimension and its run of intentionally non Oscar money making hits.
We’re on tenterhooks this morning, waiting for an announcement from The Recording Academy.
As you know, the Grammy Awards were supposed to take place on Monday, January 31st in Los Angeles. They would have been preceded over that weekend by the Musicares Person of the Year dinner honoring Joni Mitchell, and Clive Davis’s all-star Grammy pre-dinner party.
But COVID wrecked all that. Los Angeles is seeing its highest rates of infection in a year. The Staples Center would be a petrie dish, ditto the LA Convention Center. So the weekend was postponed.
Now we wait this morning for a new date. All signs from reports point to April 3rd, in Las Vegas, maybe the from the MGM Grand Hotel. That would certainly be a change of pace for everyone involved, but being flexible is the key to survival here. Harvey Mason and his leadership are making all the right, cautious moves at the Academy. But all those Recording Academy people in Vegas? The mind boggles!
I don’t know why it seems like a surprise, but Elvis Costello’s “The Boy Named If” is maybe a masterpiece. And the surprise comes because it’s Costello’s second in three years. His “Look Now,” released in October 2018, won a Grammy Award just in February 2020.
Costello is 67, and has been working away as a provocative and witty songwriter for almost 45 years. His first album, “My Aim is True,” was one of those extraordinary debuts in 1977 that heralded a new generation of punk and New Wave. But it was deceptive. Costello’s most famous song isn’t a rock number. It’s a seething ballad. “Alison” says more about Costello than anything. He loves to rock, but his heart remains in show tunes, R&B, jazz, folk, country. He is elemental in that way.
So many dozens of albums and songs, beloved by his fans, led up to “Look Now.” It’s the kind of album you can play over and over and keep discovering new cool moments, riffs, turns of phrase. “Look Now” was followed by “Hello Clockface,” which was a place holder– several good songs, but no cohesion. After four decades, Costello was allowed.
But now comes “The Boy Named If,” a baker’s dozen of head on classics, very eclectic all. Some sound like they could be from Brecht-Weill. “The Man Love You to Hate” is one of those, and it’s rave up comes pretty way in. on track 10. Indeed, the end of this album is almost better than the beginning, and that’s saying a lot. The record concludes with “Mr. Crescent,” one of the most beautiful songs Costello has ever written.
“The Boy Named If” was recorded remotely, which makes it even more of a triumph. All the musicians were in different places, separated by COVID restrictions. How producer Sebastian Krys and Costello turned this into a seamless production is the huge achievement. (Luckily I got to hear some if it live this fall so I know it can be played, and how good it sounds in front of an audience.) From the blazing kick off of “Farewell, OK.” through “Magnificent Hurt” and track four, “The Difference,” Costello and his Impostors never let go. They just grab you by the throat as if it were 1978 and this was “This Year’s Model,” his second record.
Some of the songs are light, many are dark. Costello always says he considers the fourth track of album to be key. So “The Difference,” a harrowing tale sung in abused daughter’s voice, is the place where “The Boy Named If” has to make itself work. And what starts a romantic recollection turns into something nightmarish and unforgettable. And there is also traditional Costello wordplay, as in “Trick the Truth Out.” There’s also some nice name dropping used to good purpose:
Mussolini and his mistress in defeat
The Marxists cheer a working girl
Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Karl
She’s tattooed from her head to toe
She’s inky like a girl I know
A contagion of invidia
Just like the famous Lydia
Just like Helen, late of Troy
The Myna Bird, the Myrna Loy
Bud and Lou were wrestling in the parlour
Playing cards with Gustav Mahler
We are calling every hand and every hold
I will write more about “The Boy Named If” over the weekend. The members of the Imposters– Steve Nieve (keyboards), Davy Faragher (bass and vocals), Pete Thomas (drums, percussion)– deserve their own plaques for the most interesting work done by any group on any record in recent memory. How the four of these people make this enormous, rich, textured sound is their secret, and again, they did it apart from each other!
Costello knows this album is special. He’s selling an illustrated book with it on his website (I’m awaiting my order now). He’s doing all kinds of video promotion. A Grammy in 2023? Yes, sure. But a wide, appreciative audience for “The Boy Named If” would be the bigger reward.
I’m told Bob Saget’s funeral will be tomorrow, and of course, it’s private. This would be right since Bob was Jewish and can’t be buried on Saturday.
The outpouring of love for Saget online is overwhelming. John Stamos, in particular, seems bereft on Instagram. Everyone considered Bob their “best friend” and he was!
Sources tell me that Bob’s house has been filled with people every day, all day long, since his death was announced. The guests are not just limited to family, but include all the cast of “Full House” and “Fuller House,” even Lori Loughlin.
“It’s amazing that his fake family has been as devoted as his real family,” says a friend. “But that’s the way Bob was. He took care of everyone.”
A friend said: “Can you imagine? A big TV star like that, he died in a hotel room after a gig. Like a regular stand up comic.” The friend pointed out that Saget had been eager to get on the road, even for half-full theaters, just to make people laugh.
For me personally, Bob was one of the greatest gifts of my life. No matter how busy he was with his remarkable career, he was always there with his love, his humor and his giving heart for every event, celebration and important moment in my life as well.
When he heard I helped to found griefHaven.org, he was the first person to appear at our gala to receive the “Peace of Heart” award and support our grief work. When my retirement event took place at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 2014, it was Bob who immediately volunteered to be the host and emcee for the night, and when my book, “Becoming Jewish” was published, it was Bob Saget who wrote the foreword.
You don’t want to die at 65. You want to die when you’re 95 and there’s no one left. Even as a private function, Saget will draw a huge crowd tomorrow because most of his friends are alive. But really. he’d loved that.
