When alumna Renée Lubin waltzes on stage in hair-to-heels blue getup, flutters her blue eyelashes, and innocently asks "Am I blue?"-- you think this show will probably be fun.
When she's joined by Michelle and Barack Obama, a Jack Daniels-toting Amy Winehouse, a tiara-topped, swimsuit-clad Sarah Palin adorned with a "Prez. 2012" sash, a pink-coiffed King Louis XIV, and garbage cans doing the cancan -- you realize that this is going to be an unforgettable experience.
This ensemble is part of Beach Blanket Babylon, the zany, over-the-top homage to pop culture, now in its 35th year, and the longest running musical revue in the world. Few people, though, know that this cabaret-style show -- touted as a San Francisco tradition -- has its roots in San José State University
The brainchild of the late Steve Silver, '69 MFA, Beach Blanket Babylon has dazzled more than five million people since it first opened to a full house on June 7, 1974. But the seeds for its success were sown long before then.
Often described as a cross between the Pied Piper and Peter Pan, Silver had a flair for theatrics and a knack for making people laugh. "He was eccentric, generous and crazy," says Lubin, '82 Environmental Biology, who has starred in Beach Blanket Babylon for 24 years. "He just wanted to have fun.
As a San José State student, Silver staged beauty contests, mockweddings and costume parties for Theta Chi fraternity. He once rented a bocce ball court, dug it up, filled it with fresh grass and brought stacks of hay to create the setting for his master's thesis show: five portraits of children sitting atop ponies.
"Everything Steve designed was visually stunning," says Jo Schuman Silver, Steve's widow. "He was a visionary who knew how to make his audience happy -- whether it was a group of pedestrians walking by or the Queen of England."
Post graduation, Silver started a company called Rent-A-Freak. He and his friends would make costumed appearances as a Christmas tree and Santa at cocktail parties and charity functions to "liven things up." This madcap endeavor led him to a job at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco as a prop man, where he learned the technical aspects of theatrical staging.
"Beach Blanket Babylon came into being quite by accident," recalls Schuman Silver, who has been the show's producer since Steve's death in 1995. "Steve and a couple of friends chanced upon a street performer on Union Street in San Francisco -- people were throwing money at this guy from their cars. The next thing you know, Steve and two of his friends put on their Rent-A-Freak costumes and started dancing and singing in the street. Within half an hour they had made $75 and thought it was incredible!"
A couple of weekends later, Silver (as the tap-dancing Christmas tree), and his friends (as Santa Claus and Carmen Miranda) were attracting a crowd of more than 400 people with their unique renditions of "Close to You" and "Where the Boys Are." Convinced his material was worthy of a theater setting, Silver talked to the proprietor of Savoy Tivoli, a North Beach bar and restaurant, about staging a show.
"Steve told the owner, 'We're going to play here a couple of weeks and see what happens,'" recalls Schuman Silver. "Lo and behold! The show was an overnight success." A spoof of old beach-blanket movies, the show ran to a full house for six weeks before moving to the Olympus Club and was renamed Beach Blanket Babylon.
By the time the show had moved in June 1975 to the 400-seat Club Fugazi, its permanent North Beach home, Beach Blanket Babylon, now with its signature, flamboyant hats, was already a super hit.
"When Steve started at Savoy Tivoli, he just had four performers and a very tiny stage to work with," says Schuman Silver. "He couldn't go horizontal with his designs, so he went vertical -- that's why the hats are so big. And since then they've just gotten bigger and bigger."
Imagine an eight-foot wide, 11-foot tall hat. Now add the entire San Francisco city skyline to it, complete with Victorian houses, the Ferry Building, the Coit Tower, the De Young Museum, the Transamerica Pyramid and motorized cable cars.
The sheer size of it dazzles and delights. Details like the clocks on Ghirardelli Square and the Ferry Building set at 5:05 pm -- the exact time of the 1989 earthquake -- further enchant. Put this eye-popping piece of art on the head of a singing, dancing performer and it's a showstopper.
Designed by Silver and executed by Alan Greenspan, the hats are the show's trademark. "It's basically a one-man shop," says Greenspan who has been with Beach Blanket Babylon for 31 years. "I engineer the structure, do all the electric wiring, take care of the mechanicals, sew everything by hand … if it can be built, I build it."
Greenspan doesn't divulge the secret of what holds up these bulky, oversized hats or how the cable cars move up and down the hill: "It won't be magic if I tell you," he says. Made of lightweight cardboard, foam core and tissue paper -- "the stuff that dreams are made of," to Greenspan -- the hats are like mini-stages. And every inch of the backstage area is used to store these gigantic creations.
"It's pretty tight back there," says Lubin, a veteran Beach Blanket Babylon star. "In the dressing room, there's barely 30 inches of space between us, so all we do there is put on our makeup. When I first come on stage as Glinda the Witch, there's a person holding up my dress, because it's too big to fit anywhere else. I slip into it and run off to the stage. And then it's back again to the backstage area for another character, another headpiece."
Lubin has played everyone from Whoopie Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Condeleeza Rice and Tina Turner to Diana Ross, Michelle Obama, and Janet Jackson. Her favorite spoof, though, was the one where she played Anita Hill. "I wish I could go back to that one," says Lubin. "I loved it because I got to punch Clarence Thomas on stage! But the whole point of the show is that it keeps evolving -- that's the most fun."
Schuman Silver has made sure that while the show remains true to its roots, it also remains current. "I am continuing Steve's legacy -- he created this amazing formula in 1974 that still works for today's audiences," she says. "I'm only making it more relevant, so it remains fresh and new."
She gets up every morning at five and combs through the latest headlines, paying special attention to the latest political and celebrity updates. For the most part, Schuman Silver revises content weekly, but if there's some breaking news that she thinks is good material, it's put into the show right away. "We added Sarah Palin the day her candidacy was announced," she says. "We put together the basic stuff -- a tiara, swimsuit and gigantic wig -- and decided to go with the beauty queen caricature."
Just as Palin was inserted into the script last-minute, a song about the vote against gay marriages made it to the show by mid-November. A "tickled pink" King Louis XIV pranced on stage singing, "I'm still a twosome/Thanks to Gavin Newsom/No matter what Prop. 8 may say."
"That's how good our team is," says Schuman Silver. "Director Kenny Mazlow, musical director Bill Keck, choreographer Mark Reina and I work on a piece, write a number, call a rehearsal in the afternoon and it's on the show that evening."
While the show is all about having fun, Schuman Silver sees to it that the Beach Blanket Babylon team thanks the Bay Area community that embraced it.
For the show's 30th anniversary, the Steve Silver Foundation presented the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony and American Conservatory Theater with $100,000 each and gave $10,000 to three other Bay Area theaters.
"This summer, we're going to celebrate the 35th anniversary by giving scholarships to three deserving students from high schools throughout the Bay Area. The event will take place at Lowell High School, Steve's alma mater," says Schuman Silver. Also, on March 9, Beach Blanket Babylon will be coming down to the California Theater in San José for a special showing to benefit the SJSU Alumni Association's Scholarship Fund.
"Steve loved the arts and wanted to give back to the community that brought him so much success," says Schuman Silver. "You don't hear about people in the arts giving so magnanimously to their peers, but we have been very fortunate … this is how Steve would have wanted it."
In its 35 years, Beach Blanket Babylon has entertained the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, John F. Kennedy Jr., Ralph Lauren, Mel Brooks, Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Sydney Poitier, and most recently Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. No matter what their age, religious or political beliefs, nationality or stature, people continue to love this kitschy extravaganza.
Renée Lubin sums it up: "When people ask me 'Is Beach Blanket Babylon a musical?' I go mmmmm … no! Yeah, we sing and we dance and there's drama and a storyline, but you can't really categorize it -- you have to come see it to know what it is. I call it a magical experience."
-- Mansi Bhatia
We want to hear from you.
Comment on this article on Facebook.
Read more articles from Washington Square Spring 2009.
Read articles, watch videos and tell us what you think. Join us on Facebook.
print
email