Waiting For Guffman
with Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara
Written by Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy
Directed by Christopher Guest
(Castle Rock/Turner)
by William Ham
Blaine, Missouri is a very special town. One hundred and fifty years ago, the first settlers mistook the salt in the air for the Pacific Ocean, thought it was California, and decided to stay. Blaine became the number one manufacturer of footstools in the country – even today, it’s known as the “Stool Capital of the World.” Aliens even landed there in 1946, a full year before Roswell. No wonder the city fathers want to make this the best sesquicentennial in the town’s history, capping off their anniversary festivities with an original musical production they’ve christened Red, White, and Blaine. Waiting For Guffman follows the town’s creative elite in their valiant efforts to do proper theatrical justice to a town where “if you don’t like the weather, you can wait five minutes, but with hard work, we hope to get it down to three or four.”
The play is the Blaine-child of Corky St. Claire (Christopher Guest), a flamboyant New York emigré whose credits include the town’s incendiary stage adaptation of Backdraft. His imprimateur has brought Blaine’s most talented citizens into the fold, including Ron and Sheila Albertson (Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara), “the Lunts of Blaine” who serve as travel agents by day (although they’ve never left Blaine themselves – well, Ron did once, but let’s not speak of that); Allan Pearl (Eugene Levy), a dentist with no performing experience but with show biz in his blood; Johnny Savage (Matt Keeslar), a young mechanic whose stoic virility has, um, aroused Corky’s interest; Old Man Wooley (Lewis Arquette), an old fart (it says so on his hat); and Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey), a girl who works at the Dairy Queen. Together, they set out to make RW&B the singin’est, dancin’est, Blaineyest show ever to open 2000 miles off-Broadway. But who knows? After all, a Broadway producer has promised to come by and check it out…
If you are at all familiar with Guest (whether from his contributions to nearly every National Lampoon project of the early seventies, his one-season stint on Saturday Night Live, or his remarkable resemblance to Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel) or Levy (a cast member, with O’Hara, of TV’s funniest self-satire ever, SCTV), you should know what to expect from Waiting For Guffman. This is not the slap-in-the-face-with-a-giant-trout school of comedy; instead, it’s a welcome example of a more rarefied, looser form of humor – knowing, sly, and sweetly sardonic. Every last one of the performers was obviously chosen with care for their improvisational skills and enviable abilities to create fully-formed, blithely clueless characters, endlessly amusing in their disproportionate self-importance but still recognizably human and likable. Small-time show biz is a bottomless wellspring of satire, and Guest, Levy, O’Hara, and Willard are all seasoned practitioners of the art. Of course, this picture isn’t for everybody – the laughs come steadily but never edge into over-the-top mania, and the subtle wit may elude those used to the blunderbuss approach so common these days. So here’s the litmus test: if you laughed harder at the scene in Spinal Tap where Tufnel imagines aloud about working in a “chapeau shop” than the “Stonehenge” sequence, or if you prefer Albert Brooks to Mel Brooks, then Guffman is your cup of tease.
