When Stage, Television Collide : Theater: Multimedia 'CBS Live,' opening Tuesday in New York, features performances of episodes from 'I Love Lucy' and 'The Honeymooners.'

By ANDY EDELSTEIN

Nov. 30, 1992 12 AM PT

NEWSDAY

NEW YORK — Another night, another “Honeymooners” episode.

Tonight, blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden has concocted another of what his wife, Alice, calls his crazy harebrained schemes. He and his buddy, Ed Norton, think they can make a fortune by going on TV and peddling a piece of junk called the Handy Housewife Helper that they say will revolutionize kitchen work. All he needs is $200 to make the commercial--a sum Alice adamantly refuses to lend.

And why not? She’s heard the pitch too many times before. But this time it’s gonna be different, Ralph pleads as he lumbers around the drab kitchen of their apartment. Different from his schemes to make wallpaper that glows in the dark, to manufacture no-cal pizza and to invest in a uranium field in Asbury Park.

“This thing is gonna be big, big, big,” says a bug-eyed Ralph. “This is probably the biggest thing I ever got into.”

“The biggest thing you ever got into,” Alice replies with heat-seeking sarcasm, “was your pants.”

Bang, zoom. To the moon.

Yeah, we know devoted TV spuds have seen this scene hundreds--thousands?--of times since it first aired Nov. 12, 1955. But this scene from the “Better Living Through Television” episode is not what you think. As Ed Norton himself put it in that same episode--as he watches his and Ralph’s TV-salesmanship disintegrate in a riot of falling scenery and missed cues: “This is not on film. This is coming to you very live before your eyes.”

Indeed, this Ralph and Alice are actually Bob Ari and Dana Vance, cast members of “CBS Live,” a new multimedia show opening Tuesday at the Minetta Lane Theater here. The nostalgia-tinged show incorporates slides, videotapes and music, and, as its centerpiece, live performances of genuine scripts from two TV classics, “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy.”

It’s the latest example of the boob-tubing of culture, a phenomenon fueled by both the pervasiveness of nostalgia and the ubiquity of the baby boomers’ influence. The medium that’s been decried--by two former chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission, no less--as a vast wasteland and as a toaster with pictures has now become a prime source for movies and the stage.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. In fact, there are Americans alive today who remember when shows such as “MASH” and “The Odd Couple” were movies first, when Paddy Chayevsky and Arthur Miller wrote plays for television.

But the recent big-screen successes of “The Addams Family” and “Wayne’s World” showed that half-hour sitcoms (and five-minute sketches) could be stretched into 90-minute movies. Apres Gomez le deluge : In development now are films based on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Fugitive,” “Bewitched,” “Hill Street Blues” and “The Brady Bunch.”

This last project became credible only because of the phenomenal success of “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” a stage show based on that sappy ‘70s sitcom. The show, which featured readings of episodes, began in Chicago as a once-a-week production. It then moved to the Village Gate here last fall, where it sold out nightly for several months (despite overwhelmingly negative reviews from traditional theater critics), and it ultimately spawned an equally popular Los Angeles version.

And just opened in Chicago is a “Gilligan’s Island” musical, based on the TV show about seven castaways and written by the sitcom’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, and his son, Lloyd. “It’s neither as bad as it might have been nor as much fun as one wants it to be,” wrote Chicago Tribune critic Richard Christiansen.

What all this says about the decline of Western civilization is irrelevant, say Bob Bejan, the director of “CBS Live.” It’s here, and you have to deal with it.

Bejan is perched in the balcony of the Minetta Lane, watching the new Kramden and Norton (played by Jonathan Bustle) rehearse. As the second act of the episode gets under way, they’ve donned aprons and floppy chef’s hats to prepare for their commercial. Kramden is the chef of the future whose Handy Housewife Helper will render obsolete the dozens of implements used by Norton, the chef of the past.

“Tell me, oh Chef of the Future, can it core a apple?” asks Norton.

“Ohhhh, it can core a apple,” replies Kramden, sounding uncannily like Jackie Gleason.

Upstairs, Bejan takes a swig from a plastic bottle of mineral water and laughs. “This is the coolest job,” says the hyperkinetic 32-year-old.

A cool gig for him, perhaps. Others might say that “CBS Live” is another crazy harebrained scheme. But Bejan’s company, Controlled Entropy Entertainment, and its high-rolling backers are convinced that “CBS Live” is gonna be big, big, big.

They’re convinced that a lot of folks will pay $35 to sit in a theater and watch what they can get for free every day from the comfort of their own couches.

The reason they’re convinced is that “CBS Live” is no bare-bones script reading like “The Real Live Brady Bunch.” It’s a full-fledged multimedia event with gimmicks, gadgets and gizmos.

“How to bring it to life onstage is definitely a director’s nightmare,” said Bejan, whose company produced the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” stage show, among other projects. “We could have turned the theater into a kind of 1950s TV studio so people would think, ‘This is what it must have been like back in the ‘50s,’ but that struck me as too much of a Disney-theme-park kind of thing.”

Then one day Bejan was reading a Scientific American article describing how UHF and VHF waves would go out into space unobstructed forever. “One scientist was joking that if there are aliens out there, it’s quite possible the first impressions they might get of another world is seeing Ralph Kramden and Lucy Ricardo,” Bejan said. “I laughed, so I figured that anything in Scientific American that made me laugh had to be pretty funny.”

So the Minetta Lane has been turned into a high-tech receiving station filled with electronic hums and flashing lights, able to capture those long-ago-transmitted waves. Suspended from its ceiling are 10 antennas--you remember those spiky poles that used to sit on rooftops before cable and satellite dishes made them obsolete. (They were donated by Queens residents who answered a newspaper ad that Bejan placed offering to clean their roofs if they would give up their antennas.)

Hanging throughout the theater are about 20 TV sets, which during the course of the evening play hundreds of bits and pieces of ‘50s TV minutiae--everything from Andy Devine’s puppet sidekick Froggy (“Pluck your magic twanger”) to commercials (“My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer”) and even a promotional film heralding television itself (“one of the great developments in the promising science of electronics”).

The evening’s main entertainment is the staging of the episodes: two from each show (performed on alternate nights), plus two so-called “Twilight Zone” sketches written by Bejan and his staffers in which characters from both shows interact in stories woven from actual episodes.

The other “Honeymooners” episode is “Mama Loves Mambo,” in which a suave dancer moves into the Kramdens’ building and charms all the women. The two “Lucy” episodes are both classics: the time Lucy tells Ricky she’s pregnant, and Lucy’s TV commercial for Vitameatavegamin.

That’s fun for the inveterate couch potato, but is this kind of production good for the theater?

“The producers are good folks, but they are electronic-media folks,” says Village Voice theater columnist Porter Anderson. “They didn’t wake up and say, ‘Let’s hurt live theater,’ but the effect is the same--to use our stages for the purpose of replicating TV comedy confuses the audience and doesn’t do a thing to develop new theater. . . . There’s been a 47% drop-off in new play development in the past five years.”

And he adds: “There’s nothing wrong with the material in and of itself. I’m a big ‘Honeymooners’ fan. But it has a medium--the most powerful medium in the world. Must it come into our back yard, which is shrinking every day?”

Well, Mr. Bejan, as Ricky Ricardo might say, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do. “These early scripts are really well-constructed one-act plays performed in front of a live audience,” Bejan says. “The scripts work, they hold up and they are funny. All the reasons you go to the theater apply to this. And even though it’s based on television, it’s very respectful of the discipline of the theater.”

Bejan says he’s looking for the disaffected theater audience--”and I count myself a charter member of that. There are a whole lot of people our age who don’t go to the theater because it doesn’t say anything to them anymore.”

The notion for “CBS Live” took root last year when Bejan and his associates were pondering “how it would be if we could form this repertory company that would be like a living network.” So he cold-called CBS, and after pitching the idea to various executives, his company was licensed the rights to the shows. (Bejan won’t disclose the fee but says it was extraordinarily fair.)

Controlled Entropy then hooked up with Polygram Diversified Entertainment (a co-producer of “Jelly’s Last Jam”) and the Rascoff Zysblat Organization (which manages rock groups), which put up the rest of the money for the half-million-dollar production.

The eight actors were chosen, Bejan says, more for their ability to capture the essence of the characters rather than for their physical resemblance.

Bob Ari, who plays Kramden, wasn’t a particularly big “Honeymooners” fan, and he says that it’s tough to compete with a character who’s in everybody’s bedroom nightly at 11:30. “This kind of tracing-paper acting is very difficult,” he says. “Most acting comes organically, and that’s what you start from. Our starting point here is video. I know there are huge expectations as far as duplicating (the character), but I can’t focus on that.”

But it appears inevitable that more actors might be studying sitcoms as source material. Bejan beams as he ticks off the possibilities: “ ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ I’d love to do that. ‘My Three Sons.’ ‘The Wild Wild West. . . .’ ”