Ron House, Lila Dupree, Aaron Miller and Nina Brissey in “El Grande de Coca Cola.” Photo by Ed Krieger.
It’s not uncommon for aspiring talents to pay the bills by working “straight” jobs until they get their proverbial big breaks. Often this labor takes the form of waiting on tables, and so it was for Chicago-born Ron House, currently starring in El Grande de Coca-Cola at the Ruskin Group Theatre. When House was a 20-something wannabe actor and writer, however, his career as a “waiter” took a decidedly unusual turn.
During the late 1960s, House worked as an “under-butler,” which, in the British gentleman’s gentleman pecking order “is basically an assistant to the butler,” explains the Yank, “and at these rather large, nice dinners the butlers would come in dressed in full tuxedos and white gloves and I, as under-butler, would be standing outside the door, unseen, handing the butler all of the food and taking away the dishes.”
Ron House and Alan Shearman
But what’s most extraordinary about House’s manservant career is whom he served: high society denizens Claus von Bülow and his socialite wife Sunny when they lived in a posh London townhouse at Belgrave Square behind Buckingham Palace–before they became embroiled in one of the most notorious trials of the last century. House recalls that dinner guests would include the likes of Henry Kissinger and that “Sunny would sleep very, very late in the day, get up, then order breakfast and send it back — we sent in sugar and she wanted coffee crystals, so the whole breakfast had to be sent back.
“It was like a stage performance. Mr. Balford [the head butler] would be there with the gloves and the full white tie tuxedo at 11:00 just to go in and serve her breakfast… I wasn’t their friend, I was a servant and got the job because Sunny traveled with a staff that only spoke French, and I’d translate for the English staff,” says House, whose facility with languages also serves him well in El Grande de Coca-Cola, which he performs largely in Spanish.
Claus’ father, Svend Borberg, was a Danish playwright, believed to have collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. His mother, Jonna von Bülow af Plüskow, came from an old Danish-German family of noble lineage. Sunny was an American heiress suffering from hypoglycemia; following marital difficulties and Sunny’s slipping into a vegetative state (her coma lasted 28 years), Claus was suspected of foul play.
(Jeremy Irons won the Best Actor Oscar for depicting Claus in the 1990 movie Reversal of Fortune. The film was based on attorney Alan Dershowitz’s book about the case and Claus’ trials for attempted murder. Glenn Close portrayed Sunny, Ron Silver played Dershowitz and renowned actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen was Sunny’s maid. Alas poor Yorick, nobody played the role of under-butler Ron House).
Although House served the von Bülows before their sturm und drang in the 1980s, one might expect that once he quit that day job and artistically blossomed, his work would tend towards the dramatic. On the contrary, House has specialized onstage and onscreen in comedy, which includes his own droll take on the von Bülows in Decorum Maintained, a play that the busy House envisions will be presented in Los Angeles sometime in 2014.
Claus and Martha (Sunny) Von Bulow photographed at a party in 1968 by Patrick Lichfield.
In the meantime, El Grande de Coca-Cola, the production that House is now appearing in and co-wrote with longtime collaborator Alan Shearman (Diz White and John Neville-Andrews also share writing credits), is a bit of madcap merriment that often veers towards sheer hilarity.
In this raucous revival that director Shearman notes “opened almost 40 years ago to the day in London,” House plays Pepe Hernandez. This not so masterful master of ceremonies fancies himself to be “Señor Show Business” and is presenting what he purports to be a spectacular cabaret act, backed by his uncle who owns the local Coke factory. The hapless Pepe contends that the performance at a rinky-dink nightclub in the boondocks somewhere South of the Border will feature international stars. But when these headliners are no-shows for his planned “Parada de las Estrellas” (Parade of the Stars), as a last ditch effort the desperate Pepe casts amateur members of his family — and let the games begin!
Joining Pepe on the nightspot’s stage are two leggy, sexy dancers played by Nina Brissey and Lila Dupree, along with David Lago and Aaron Miller, who double as musicians and performers, plus Paul Denk in a cameo. The cabaret show-within-a show includes inept acrobatics, transparently phony magic acts, Annie Oakley-type marksmanship (or lack of), a variety of musical renditions ranging from piano solos to heavy metal to opera, kibitzing with the audience and more.
The stylized dancing — from tango to hip-hop — is choreographed by Tor Campbell, who has also designed choreography for the Sands and Venetian hotels in Macau, China and teaches Broadway dancing at Your Neighborhood Studio in Culver City.
El Grande’s mirthful mayhem is presided over by Pepe, the emcee who announces only in Español but is nevertheless easy to follow, even if one does not speak the tongue of Cervantes. Overall, the show disproves Kander and Ebb’s contention that “life is a cabaret, old chum!”
House’s circuitous comedic path has included Second City Company stints when David Steinberg and Fred Willard performed with the legendary improvisational Chicago troupe in the late 1960s. In his mid-twenties, House relocated to Europe, where he met Shearman, who was from the part of London called Wimbledon (of tennis tournament fame).
Ron House
“Low Moan Spectacular was a fringe theater group in London; I joined it about a year after Ron founded it” in the early 1970s, says Shearman. “It was designed as a sketch comedy group. The genesis of El Grande de Coca-Cola came out of that. It was a sketch comedy show that started with this South or Central American nightclub and ended with that, but in between it was just a series of comedy sketches. When I joined the group along with John Neville-Andrews, I played piano and he played drums, so we added music into the mix.”
Shearman notes that director Vivian Matalon, then running London’s prestigious Hampstead Theatre Club, fortuitously attended El Grande’s first run-through. The future Tony and Drama Desk Award winner for 1980’s Morning’s at Seven suggested mounting an entire play based solely on the nightclub portions of the sketch show, which Matalon would present at his theatre as a late night show. The Low Moaners agreed to do so and the revamped production proved so popular that it became the main show in 1971, which led to a tour of Britain and Holland.
While performing at the Edinburgh Festival, Low Moan Spectacular encountered Gil Adler, who then worked for the New York State Council of the Arts and brought El Grande from the U.K. to Manhattan in 1973. It went on to enjoy a three year Off-Broadway run, followed by performances in other cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Toronto. The show ran in LA at the fabled Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip with Jeff Goldbum and the late Ron Silver (who, ironically, later co-starred in Reversal of Fortune as the lawyer defending Ron House’s former boss).
El Grande jump-started Goldblum and Silver’s acting careers; Adler went on to produce such movies as Superman II and Valkyrie. In 1978, El Grande became the first concert show to be shot by HBO, notes Shearman. Adler shares producer credits for the new El Grande de Coca-Cola production with Michael R. Myers and John Ruskin, who are, respectively, the managing director and the artistic director of the Ruskin Group Theatre Company.
Low Moan Spectacular’s next hit, Bullshot Crummond, written by El Grande’s co-authors along with Derek Cunningham, was in the same satirical vein and followed a similar theatrical route, opening at the Hampstead in 1972, then playing at London’s Greenwich Theatre, in Scotland, Continental Europe, New York and San Francisco, where it ran for five years. The play spoofs the Bulldog Drummond character created by Herman Cyril McNeile in 1920. Bulldog was an upper crust World War I hero who fought crime in a series of novels, on a radio program and in the movies–where the dashing Bulldog was alternately depicted by Ralph Richardson, Ronald Colman and Ray Milland.
Ron House, Alan Shearman and Louisa Hart in “Bullshot Crummond” in 1975.
Showtime produced a 1979 TV version of Bullshot Crummond, the cable station’s first concert show, Shearman says.” He co-starred as the parody’s title character, the square-jawed WWI flying ace, Olympian and detective. House portrayed Count Otto Bruno, Bullshot’s monocle-wearing German nemesis, the so-called “demonic Hun” and “second most dangerous man in Europe,” with a dueling scar and the heaviest Teutonic accent this side of Colonel Klink. Diz White played damsel in distress Rosemary Fenton, Bullshot’s love interest.
In 1983 the trio reprised their caricaturish roles in a film version send-up of McNeile’s adventurer of empire produced by George Harrison. Shearman calls working with the former Beatle “fantastic. He became a sort of friend. We were so excited to meet him…. It was an absolute pleasure to do. George was just terrific, he invited us to his Friar Park estate at Henley[-on-Thames]…. I loved the fact that I got to jam with him, because I play piano and at the end of the movie we wrote a little song with Dick Clement, and he’s actually singing on it. So I love to go around saying, ‘I actually co-wrote a song George Harrison is singing on,’” although Shearman manages to refrain from calling himself “the fifth Beatle.”
The Brit adds that “the whole project happened by a fluke.” It transpired because while House auditioned for another movie role, he discussed the Bulldog stories with director Dick Clement. Although the picture that House read for fell through, Clement took the Bullshot Crummond idea to HandMade Films, Harrison’s production company, responsible for 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian and many other movies. Harrison and his HandMade partner, Denis O’Brien, greenlit Bullshot, which Clement directed.
In 2010 House wrote and directed Bullshot Crummond and the Invisible Bride of Death, staged at North Hollywood’s Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center. This first stab at a Bullshot follow-up received a mixed Los Angeles Times review and was, according to House, ensnared in a literary rights dispute that, he states, has since been resolved. House and Shearman have now co-written the first draft of a new theatrical sequel likewise called Bullshot Crummond and the Invisible Bride of Death, which they plan to premiere in 2014 at the nearly 250-seat Lakewood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Shearman says that for this upcoming production, “we started from scratch,” collaborating on a substantial rewrite that Shearman will direct, although neither he nor House plan to act in this latest installment of the Bullshot oeuvre.
Lila Dupree and Aaron Miller
Similarly, the rendition of El Grande de Coca-Cola at the Ruskin Group Theatre has, Shearman estimates, up to 20 percent never-before-performed material, such as a riff on Donald Trump’s reality TV show, as well as Campbell’s all new choreography. The director adds that content from the original 1971 production has been updated and adapted. This is also the first time since the show ‘s 1986 revival at Manhattan’s the Village Gate that Shearman has personally participated in El Grande, and the first time in a dozen years that House is doing so in a play that so frequently runs under the aegis of others. (Samuel French has published the texts of both El Grande and Bullshot Crummond.)
Shearman is set to direct another takeoff, Monty Python’s Spamalot, in August at Portland’s Lakewood Theatre. Composer John Du Prez, Spamalot‘s co-creator, also wrote the score for the Bullshot Crummond movie. In addition, Shearman believes that he’ll be directing a play with Fred Willard–written by Mary Willard, Fred’s wife.
House adds that the raison d’etre for the LA revival of El Grande de Coca-Cola is to take the one-acter on the road to Las Vegas, “where it’s never been done — and it’s a perfect Vegas show” for that Mecca of nightclubs, House asserts. Shearman goes on to say that Gil Adler would produce a Sin City production that would “be on the Strip, it’ll be a pretty big production. Because the show is already the right length and has no intermission, it’s kind of tailor-made for Las Vegas,” Shearman says. “It’s a silly cabaret show — there’s nothing to think about.” Indeed, this could start a new trend in “Strip clubs.”
So, who is “guilty” of perpetrating this latest cavalcade of silliness? One could say that along with Shearman and company (House’s partners in crime), “the under-butler did it.”
El Grande de Coca-Cola, Rustin Group Theatre, 3000 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, 90405. Opens July 19. Fri-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm. Through August 31. Tickets: $25. (310) 397-3244. Ruskingrouptheatre.com.
**All El Grande de Coca-Cola production photos by Ed Krieger.