CHICAGO - Fittingly enough, the first person to give a standing ovation to the SCTV reunion at the 50th anniversary celebration of this city’s Second City, was Guy Caballero (Joe Flaherty) getting up out of his wheelchair.
The SCTV station manager’s miraculous ambulation brought the first of many screaming applause breaks as the most complete reunion yet of the gang from Melonville returned to the stage. In Eugene Levy’s case, it was 34 years since he’d appeared at the converted Chinese dry cleaners on Wells St. that changed the world of comedy.
No, SCTV is not on the air. Although alumnus David Steinberg is assembling a documentary on this special weekend (capped by an alumni performance night that will include sketches with Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Bill Garlin, George Wendt, Toronto troupe reps Colin Mochrie and Bob Martin and many more), and there will be a special on TBS, the SCTV night was an audience-only one-off.
It will never be seen, unless someone among the crowd who paid hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets posts it on YouTube via his cellphone.
Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara and Harold Ramis gave the crowd every character they could have wanted, not played by John Candy.
And even he was there in spirit in a special edition of the Sammy Maudlin show, in which Sammy (Flaherty) eulogized his late sidekick “William B. Williams,” and introduced his replacement, his accountant Moe Green (Ramis, whom fans will remember was the original station manager of SCTV).
The tribute was capped by Jackie Rogers Jr. (Short) and his “non celeb” dance partner (Martin) performing the dance routine that got them kicked off of Dancing With The Stars, and a surreal cheesy duet between Bobby Bittman (Levy) and Lola Heatherton (O’Hara) dedicated to the genius of Canadian songwriters (they sang a medley of You Oughta Know, Sometimes Whe We Touch, Sunglasses At Night, Constant Craving and If You Could Read My Mind).
Some sketches were played almost word for word from the original series - Earl Camembert (Levy) and Floyd Robertson from SCTV news, ESL teacher O’Hara trying to teach English to Perini Scleroso (Martin).
On other occasions, they inserted SCTV characters into vintage sketches from their days in Toronto’s Second City (itself 35 years old this year) - like the teacher (O’Hara) who meets with the parents of her five most underachieving students. This sketch provides us with the trivia that the last name of gangster Rocco (Flaherty) from the soap The Days Of The Week was Jacuzzi, that Edith Prickley (Andrea Martin) has a son named Sebastian and songwriter Irving Cohen (Short) has a daughter named Ragtime.
But the best, if not the last, word came from uber-critic Bill Needle (Thomas) who critiqued both the troupe (“mythologizing a 25-year-old TV show with no props, no rehearsal and they’re all 25 years older, while Saturday Night Live is still on) and the event, singling out Mike Myers and Tina Fey, two alumni who didn’t make it (“I guess they couldn’t get over the moats around their castles”), today’s upcoming sketchwork by Stephen Colbert (“I don’t know how he’s going to do without Jon Stewart as his lead-in”) and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin’s sidekick status (“When Larry David says ‘I can’t wear these socks,’ Jeff says ‘You can’t wear those socks!’ - ‘They’ll make me look ridiculous’ - ‘They’ll make you look ridiculous!’”)
It was a dash of acid that showed the soul of satire can still move them.
It was loose, sometimes rough (Ramis, who never much liked working on stage anyway, used a lot of pieces of paper). But for true fans of Melonville, it was still a Sunshine Semester.
POSTSCRIPT: The flight from Toronto to Chicago was so full of Canadian comic actors (Colin Mochrie, his wife Deb McGrath, Jayne Eastwood, Kathy Lasky, Teresa Pavlinek, sometime SCTV’er John Hemphill, Melody Johnson, Jack Mosshammer and more), there were jokes about who’d get top billing if the plane went down. The consensus was Mochrie.
