‘Jersey Boys,’ 'Sophie Tucker’ and ‘I Love Lucy Live’

Believe me, I get it: Shows are expensive to produce. A tried and true product, like a revival or a story about someone we already know, guarantees an audience — even if, as is often the case, much of that audience uses walkers and needs hearing devices. I may watch these shows with a certain nostalgia, but what do they mean to a younger, newer audience who never saw these performers and don’t remember them — especially when they can Google the real original on YouTube?

That’s the challenge for nostalgia producers and performers alike: They must capture the essence of the original while at the same time adding some fresh element. That’s what Kathy Halenda achieved in Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas. She combined the singer-comedienne’s gutsy, bawdy, larger-than-life personality with a charming sexuality. The songs were a combination of familiar melodies — “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” — along with some personal statements (“I Don’t Want to Get Thin” and “Life Begins at Forty”).

Colorized TV classics

Jersey Boys takes us back to a time when we focused on the music rather than the glitz, the glamour, and the gossip. The show is nonstop music that most of us carry around in our DNA by now — “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” — and it’s fascinating to discover that these sounds were created by some kids from Jersey who were just trying to stay out of trouble and make a few bucks. As a Jersey girl myself, I enjoyed focusing on the positive stuff that comes out of my home state for a change. But I did wonder: Why create shows around music that already exists or stories we already know? Why not create new stories with new music?

And then there are the shows based on old shows. A friend’s kids told me over Thanksgiving dinner that they would never watch a film in black and white. Perhaps that’s why CBS (which now owns the Desilu catalogue) colorized parts of two original episodes for its recent “I Love Lucy Christmas Special”: a Christmas tree-trimming episode that included the groundbreaking birth of Little Ricky along with the grape stomping episode (later immortalized on film in Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts).

A non-zany Lucy

Since we can still see the original on YouTube, I Love Lucy Live On Stage confronted a challenge. It’s not a show about Lucy and Ricky, nor does it add anything to the existing canon. It took two episodes from the original series and performed them pretty much as they were originally written. So what was the point? Who would pay $89 and up to see such an exercise?

To be sure, Lucy Live On Stage did put the audience into a reimagined Desilu Studio taping of the show to give it some context. In fact, Mark Christopher Tracy as Maury Jasper, the Desilu Playhouse Host, carried the show along. He introduced the episodes and the stars, handled an audience trivia quiz, introduced the commercials sung by the Crystaltone Singers, and let us know what was going on when the characters supposedly flubbed their lines.

But ultimately the concept didn’t quite work. While Sirena Irwin possessed the appropriate looks and voice for Lucy, she played the zany, leggy redhead with a grace that undercut Lucille Ball’s slapstick clowning. And Bill Mendieta gave us a Ricky Ricardo with an accent but without the presence that might make us perceive him as the anchor in the relationship.

More important, the episodes chosen for the show lacked the pathos that made Lucy’s craziness so appealing. The original episodes usually delivered a lesson about generosity and caring. The episodes chosen here played with the clichés of the series — especially Lucy’s machinations for getting Ricky to let her perform — but never went beyond that.

What’s the point of reviving memorabilia if it doesn’t tell us anything new? Certainly there’s no shortage of new material, as the recent success of the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Nerds attests. Are theaters catering to older theatergoers because they’re the only ones with the discretionary time and money?

If this is true, what’s the future of theater as those older folks die off? Will theaters go the way of the grand movie palaces of the past? Perhaps we’ll gather only in the great mega-churches to hear preachers like Rick Warren, who’ve turned religion into free entertainment. Or maybe we’ll sit together in coffee shops, each of us with our own portable personal entertainment device, laughing all by ourselves.