If “SCTV” had parodied “Oklahoma!,” it probably would have been renamed “Okinawa!,” starred Billie Jean King and Julio Iglesias and featured cameos from Bob Hope, Merv Griffin and Jerry Lewis.
As it is, the production of “Oklahoma!” that opened recently at New York’s Gershwin Theater stars Andrea Martin, an “SCTV” veteran, and she’ll be playing it relatively straight.
Martin is just one of the alums of the cult Canadian sketch-comedy show who suddenly seem to be everywhere.
“This is an opportunity to develop somebody with depth, and sketch comedy doesn’t allow you to do that,” says Martin about playing Aunt Eller in the musical. “It’s not three minutes, as sketch comedy is. It’s three hours. And the focus of this is not to get a laugh after each line — it’s to tell the story.”
Martin, who was nominated for a Tony in the musical “Candide” and won the Best Featured Actress award in 1993 for her role in the Broadway musical “My Favorite Year,” is best known for her work on “SCTV,” particularly as Edith Prickley, the over-the-top manager of the fictional “SCTV” television station. But she wants to put Prickley’s leopard-skin pillbox hat and horn-rimmed glasses well behind her.
Moving forward
She stopped taking roles in sitcoms, hired the acting coach who helped Hilary Swank and Helen Hunt win Oscars, and focused on changing her image.
Many of her “SCTV” castmates also have been undergoing career transformations.
– With the monster success of “American Pie,” Eugene Levy has developed from a journeyman comic character actor into a star. His new TV series, “Greg the Bunny,” is generating a media buzz. Levy also is at work on his third improv collaboration with Christopher Guest — a lampoon of folk singers.
– Martin Short morphs into his obese alter ego, Jiminy Glick, every Saturday in Comedy Central’s “Prime Time Glick,” a critical hit that began its second season last month with guest Tom Hanks.
– Harold Ramis has become one of the premier comedy directors in Hollywood. Ramis, who co-wrote “Animal House,” also wrote and directed the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal hit “Analyze This.” The sequel, “Analyze That,” starts shooting in New York in two weeks.
– Catherine O’Hara has co-starred in Levy’s improv movies with Guest — she was the well-traveled Cookie Guggelman Fleck in “Best in Show” — and recently did a cameo with Ramis in “Orange County.”
– Joe Flaherty played dads in the short-lived but critically hailed TV shows “Freaks and Geeks” and “Go Fish.”
– Dave Thomas was in last year’s slapstick romp “Rat Race.”
– Rick Moranis, who had a successful film career, has unofficially retired from show business.
– John Candy, arguably “SCTV’s” biggest star, died in 1994.
With the resurgence of many of its players’ careers, interest in “SCTV” (which ran from 1976 to 1984) has risen. A long-rumored DVD project is in the works for late fall. And NBC aired old “SCTV” episodes after “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” for about a year until “Last Call With Carson Daly” started in January.
When it was on the air, “SCTV” was in the shadow of its NBC stablemate “Saturday Night Live.” “SNL,” because of its live broadcast, had an immediacy that hurt “SCTV” by comparison.
“On `SCTV’,” says Short, the only regular to make the jump to “SNL,” “you’d write for six weeks, perform for six weeks and edit for six weeks. On `SNL’, you can be a star on Saturday night, go to the [post-show] party and enjoy your accolades — and if you don’t have an idea on Sunday night, you feel like a total failure. It was more of a roller coaster.”
A different focus
More demure than “SNL,” “SCTV” rarely touched on topics like sex or drugs, and it took place in the fictional town of Melonville, almost as far culturally from New York as Kabul.
Still, the show was subtly dark and could offer devastating showbiz satires. “SCTV’s” parody of the play “Evita!,” called “Indira,” featured Martin as the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and Flaherty as her adviser, yodeling country singer Slim Whitman.
“We didn’t have a lot of network interference,” recalls Levy. “When they did have complaints, we would listen to them, nod and say `Good point,’ and then when they’d leave, we would go back to what we were doing. If they threatened to pull the plug on the show, we said, `Let them do it.’ We were young and kinda stupid.”
“SCTV,” which was nominated for 13 writing Emmys (winning twice), is being recognized in Canada. The cast will get spots on Toronto’s Walk of Fame in May, joining Wayne Gretzky, Gordon Lightfoot and other pillars of Canadian culture.
“We became disproportionately large in Canada because of our notoriety,” says Thomas. “We’re sort of like old legends in Canada now.”
Adds Martin, “It truly was just to make each other laugh and have a vehicle to express ourselves.”
