Lucy Loosens Up
by Jess Oppenheimer
(from "Laughs, Luck...and Lucy")
"EVEN WITH ALL of the changes in the show, I still had a problem–Lucy was relatively stiff working in front of an audience. She just didn’t have the wildly antic quality that I was looking for. I had been trying for some time to get her and Dick Denning to loosen up and act out the jokes and reactions, to dramatize what was going on, instead of just standing there waiting to read the next line when the laugh subsided. I knew how effective this could be from watching Jack Benny do his radio program. Jack would lay his hand against his cheek, open his eyes wide, and look out at the studio audience, slowly changing his point of view, like a comic lighthouse. And as long as he looked, they laughed.
I remember telling Lucy, 'Let go. Act it out. Take your time.' But she was simply afraid to try. So one day, at rehearsal, I handed Lucy a couple of Jack Benny tickets.
She looked at me blankly.'What are these for?'
'I want you to go to school,' I told her.
It did the trick. When Lucy came into the studio for the next rehearsal, I could see she was excited. 'Oh my God, Jess,' she gushed, 'I didn’t realize!'
She just couldn’t wait to get started trying out the new, emancipated attitude she had discovered. On that week’s show Lucy really hammed it up, playing it much broader than she ever had before. She coupled this with her newfound freedom of movement, and there were times I thought we’d have to catch her with a butterfly net to get her back to the microphone.
The audience roared their approval, and Lucy loved it. So did I." |
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