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...with David Cuthbert
by George Patterson

David Cuthbert, a writer for the Times Picayune for over 30 years, has titillated and entertained New Orleans audiences through the years with wonderfully outrageous home grown musical comedies, most recently his collaboration with Ricky Graham and Harry Mayronne, Jr. that resulted in last year's Big Easy Award winning musical comedy spoof of old movie serials, Daryl's Perils: Demon Dominatrix Of The Moon Meets The Amazon Queen Of The Lost Lagoon.

This terrific trio is at it again. Their latest confection, At The Club Toot Sweet On Bourbon Street, will be unveiled, so to speak, on June 19 at the Southern Repertory Theatre, 3rd Level, One Canal Place, for the Krewe of Petronius, which has bought that night out. After a week of previews, The show opens officially June 27 and will run through July 26.

Recently we got together over a tape recorder and a bowl of mints, in the charming Victorian sitting parlor on the second floor of Ambush headquarters on Bourbon St. Herewith that conversation:

Q: On how many theatrical collaborations have you been involved, David?
A: Gosh, a number of them. Bob Bruce and I basically working with two different composers wrote 12 shows together and now this is the second show with Ricky [Graham], and with Philip Melancon-I've been writing for a couple of years another show-so I guess this is basically my third major collaboration.

Most have been musical comedies. We were inspired-I loved the Children's Corner shows down at Le Petit. Especially after seeing Rapunzel there.
Q: Who wrote Rapunzel?
A: That was Freddie [Palmisano] and Sharon O'Brien. It was a great show.
Q: This was during-?
A: The Golden Era--
Q: Luis Barroso's reign?
A: Yes. And I got Ty [Tracy] and Bob [Bruce] down there to see the show and I said "isn't this wonderful?" And Ty said "you guys could do something like that." And I said "oh, I don't think so." But the great thing that Ty can do is he can tell people "get up there and sing a song and show us what you've got." So Bob and I wrote Moon Over Montevideo and I guess that was 1974-a movie parody-which were very popular then-Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda, that kind of thing and that started us off and we had great fun and some of my happiest memories of doing things is sitting down with Bob and a legal pad and trying to make each other laugh. I loved it.
Q: Who starred in Moon?
A: Helen Blank was Alice Foy and Ginger Guma was Carmen Veranda. Sidney Arroyo was a combination of Don Ameche and John Payne-next year will be the 25th anniversary of that show.
Q: Now what is your official title at the Times Picayune?
A: I'm a staff writer with the Living section but I've done all kinds of things at the paper.
Q: How long?
A: Over 30 years now.
Q: And in those 30 years you've always been with the Living section?
A: No. I was a City Desk reporter. We used to have a Sunday Desk and I was an assistant on the Sunday Desk. All this time I was doing amusements work on the side and not getting paid for it because in those days there were only two guys doing amusements: Frank Gagnard for the Picayune and James Perry for the States Item and they did everything. Frank did everything. Jim did not do classical music. Frank did movies, theatre, classical music, opera-everything. Anyway Frank was a great teacher because he taught me to be amusing when writing amusements-you know, you're writing about entertainment you ought to be entertaining whilst doing it! I don't know, people who make me laugh are people I gravitate toward.
Q: All right, people who make you laugh-things that make you laugh-so far you've told me-in writing for the theatre that is the hook-the beginning?
A: It really is.
Q: So this we can relate also to the tremendous amount of work you've done at the Times Picayune. Since I've been back in New Orleans, since 1983, I've only known you to be in the Living Section and I see your work. If you were to take all this work and put it together, no telling-piles of copy--
A: There are boxes of clippings all over my house--
Q: You are constantly reviewing television shows, movies and books--
A: Well, the major thing I did at the Picayune was I created TV Focus and for 16 years I was the editor of TV Focus and I had this great group of people I assembled-and we were very funny with TV Focus. We got away with all kinds of things. We had a great time.
Q: Most of your theatrical productions-the things you've written, or helped to write- have tapped into this vast knowledge you have of movie or entertainment trivia.
A: Yeah. I'm the guy at the paper they come to and say, "who was in this movie?" or who sang that song?
Q: Especially your telling me about Moon and all the different MGM movies stars you made fun of.
A: But you've got to love it to make fun of it. In my experience anyway, you've got a have a knowledge and love of the subject and you've got to find something there that you can hang on to because if you're too acidity.... But that enjoyment doesn't come across to the audience. You want to entertain people. You want to make them smile and laugh and you've got to have a good time with your subject to let your audience have a good time with it.
Q: But you've got to have an edge-there has to be some acid--
A: Yeah
Q: Daryl's Perils was the ultimate parody. I hesitate to say satire-but that's where its edge was-satire-of real movie dreck.
A: It's a prime example of a sensibility where you know something is of an inferior nature but you love it partly for its inferior nature--
Q: Exactly
A: You know like B movies and things-like women's pictures-Madame X-I can sit there and watch Lana Turner in Madame X and I can laugh my ass off and I can cry the next minute too-it works for me on both levels.Madame X
Q: Now we get to At The--
A: At The Club Toot Sweet On Bourbon Street--
Q: Which sounds like a lyric.
A: It is. That's why the title got changed.
Q: I'm just curious to know if in the lyric it does say "at the club toot sweet"--
A: It does.
Q: Because already there's stuff that comes out of rehearsals and things that Becky suggested you call it "At The Club Toot Sweet On Bourbon Street" so it would be at the top of the listings.
A: That's actually true--
Q: Like ...And The Ball And All.
A: The song lyric had already been written and it already had it in there so we weren't like just doing something for a craven purpose!
Q: Who generated the beginnings of this particular show?
A: This is one of the few times I did.
Q: You started it. Why?
A: Because my father worked on Bourbon St. for more than twenty years. He was a comedian and a ventriloquist. He was Phil D'Rey. He had some very distinctive dummies. He had Gangrene who was a talking gorilla and he had Drunken Hines who was a life size figure that walked. It stood on its legs. Always a ventriloquist's dummy sits on something. Gangrene sat on his own cage. Daddy pushed the cage out and behind the bars you saw this gorilla in military uniform because he was in guerrilla warfare. Drunken Hines ambled out with Daddy guiding him.

I've had a sort of checkered childhood-didn't we all-but I would vacillate back and forth between living with my father and living with my mother's relatives in Michigan who were very strict and religious and my father was just anything goes. "You want to stay up all night and watch old movies? That's fine with me. You want to come down to the club and sit in the balcony and watch these girls take off their clothes, that's fine with me." Daddy was for complete permissiveness.
Q: What was his background?
A: He was British and my mother was his fifth wife. He was married seven times in all. He has children all over the world. I have two full brothers and two half-sisters and an adopted brother--
Q: How did he get involved with this kind of entertainment?
A: He was a self-taught musician. He played piano in silent movie theatres. He started doing tent shows.
Q: So he was a vaudevillian?
A: Yes.
Q: And the vaudeville aspect came to Bourbon St.?
A: Bourbon St. was a very fancy residential district that fell into complete disrepair from the 1920's to WWII and the influx of servicemen looking for you know-a "good time"-there were already a few clubs here but most were on Rampart St. During the war that's when the shift came, from Rampart to Bourbon and these clubs started springing up. By the early 50's there were some very fancy show rooms on Bourbon St. The Casino Royale was an enormous club, very fancy, Ciro's, the Moulin Rouge, these were all big show rooms. They had variety shows. They were basically vaudeville.
Q: Burlesque...?
A: Moved over with an added element of burlesque to it. I've got ads from all these clubs-been going through the newspaper files-and your bill would have a dance act, singer, comic emcee, there were contortionists, magicians and a star stripper and maybe a supporting strip. You also had acts like Carrie Fennell who sang risque songs and also "Cupcake" O'Mason, she sang risque songs. And you had novelty strips--
Q: Like Rusty Warren--
A: The one Harry Mayronne loves is Ruth Wallace-she played the Monteleone a lot. This was also the era of-what was his name-guys did it too-sang risque songs-Dwight Fiske. He didn't play Bourbon St. He played the St. Charles Hotel.
Q: At Club Toot Sweet on Bourbon St. is in the fifties?
A: 1958 specifically. Because that was the time when they were doing a lot of raids. There had been some police scandals and I think they were trying to erase the public's memory of that. And they would sweep down and arrest girls for b drinking, for obscenity, any infraction they could find and they would herd them into court, forty and fifty at a time, and it's very funny if you look at the newspaper files for you see the girls being escorted into the paddy wagon in their Bourbon St. flashy finery and when they go to court, two or three days later, they've got on pretty little dresses, and gloves and hats and they're holding their purses and it's-entertainment-pure entertainment. I never touched any of this. My father died in 1970 and in the 70s and 80s I was working on the paper doing news stories, general entertainment stories, from time to time I remember doing a piece on Chris Owens. You know Chris has been on Bourbon St. for more than 40 years. Our show is set in 1958 and she was a starring on Bourbon St. then.
Q: Do you mention her in the show?
A: Not yet. But the show is changing so much. It's a real organic thing. It's evolving during the rehearsals, but I didn't touch on any of this for the longest time until Peggy Scott Laborde did a special on Bourbon St. and she interviewed me and I started talking about all these people. People contacted me. I did a couple of Big Easy stories on Kitty West, who was the Evangeline Oyster Girl; on a lady I called the "Snap Queen"-she took pictures for all the night clubs. Then I did the monologue for Native Tongues which was based on Allouette LeBlanc who was a tassel twirler who made costumes for the girls on the street. Peggy's documentary showed years later in Charleston, SC. Allouette called me. I did a story on her. I did a story just recently on Kalantan who was-when I was 10 years old Kalantan was to me the epitome of beauty and glamour and her husband Adolfo Martinez was a hair stylist. She and my father had the same agent when they weren't working Bourbon St., and they traveled throughout the South-Huntsville, AL, Panama City Beach, Dallas-one of these places-and we'd hook up and it was heaven for me 'cause Calantan and Adolfo were like kids and we'd just sit there and watch "Rocky" and "Bullwinkle" and stuff our faces with M & Ms and she was adorable to me. I loved her. I was always looking for a mom 'cause I didn't have one. And to find her again after all these years was just a thrill.

I started talking to these ladies, interviewed Stormy's son-Stormy's dead now but found her son-and I had an idea cooking for a long time about trying to do a show set on Bourbon St. And then people found me. Even when I wasn't looking for this material, it found me. A dancer named Audrey Maduel-Frank Gagnard told me "Oh she's a riot, David, you oughta interview this woman." So I went to her house in Metairie and interviewed her and we were talking and she was telling me some of the places she played and she had played Casino Royale. And I said, "My dad played the Casino Royale."

"Who was your dad, baby?" And I said Phil D'Rey. "Ahhh. Wait here!" And she gets her scrap book out and she opens it up and she shows me a picture of herself when she played Chicago. My dad played Chicago for years. And there's my father and his dummy with Audrey Maduel and she's putting her leg up for the dummy to inspect. So I'm running into this stuff all over the place and I'm thinking there must be a reason for all this material to be revisiting me and I oughta do something with it. But, from the various collaborators I have, nobody could see the possibilities in this until Ricky.

We got together originally to do this show but then Daryl's Perils came up and that was Ricky's idea which I loved, 'cause I love those serials, I've got 'em all on my video shelf, "Commander Cody," "Green Hornet," I gotta 'em all. So we had a great time doing that and now we're doing this.

You know it's kinda hard because Ricky and Becky and Roy [Haylock] make their livings from entertainment. I make my living from the newspaper and entertainment is a sideline so we're working around everyone's schedule but the planets came together and we were able to get Southern Rep for the summer so let's do it. So we're doing it. And it's become its own thing. We wrote a whole script originally with all kinds of stories going on and we had a reading and the stories interfered with the nightclub show so basically what Ricky said and I agreed was, "we've got to do a night club show because that is what we're supposed to be doing." It's got to work as a nightclub show first and foremost and if we can have some of this other stuff going on around it fine.

So that's what it is now, it's little bits and pieces threaded throughout.

The characters are the cashier, the doorman, the barmaid, there's an unseen gangster boss lurking around the premises. We concentrated on the numbers. And then Harry Mayronne came into it and Harry has this encyclopedic knowledge of 50s music-forms that I had forgotten-the sort of saucy patter songs-he knows the Ruth Wallace oeuvre.

Becky started out as being the sort of Evelyn West kind of character-she was the girl with the $50,000 treasure "chest" that was insured by Lloyds of London. Evelyn gave me my first job in show business in St. Louis. I operated a follow spot for her. And by that time she was kind of old. She was in her fifties-God, I'm in my fifties now-but when I was 16 that seemed old to me. Her whole act was in rhymed patter and she just sort of shook her titties. She would have a few drinks and lose her place and all she could do was to restart her act-go back to the beginning of the act-and it really made for some long shows. That's what Becky was supposed to be. Later we thought of Becky as the Carrie Fennell or "Cupcake" O'Mason. She'll jiggle her tits and she'll jiggle in time to the music. She does a song about it's not enough to have big tits, you've gotta make 'em do something. Which is based on Allouette's remark. She said, "Honey, I don't show 'em, I just do tricks with 'em."

Q: So what's Becky's character's name?
A: She's Busty Rusty Russell, the Saucy Sophisticate of Song. And she's got a song called "It's The Bounce On Top That Counts". But then we do a little burlesque with her as well.
Q: How big is the cast?
A: I think it's eleven people now, with some doubling. We have one girl who works at Rick's Cabaret-Veronica [Giacano]-and another girl who works at the Candy Club out in New Orleans East, Lara [Nelms], who's just gorgeous. They both have some acting experience. They're adding wonderful authenticity and tell hysterical stories about what it's like to work today and we're bringing some of the ladies in, we're bringing Kitty West and Suzanne Robins in to show the real stripper walk. Kitty says, "Honey, when we walked out on the stage, we walked out like royalty." Suzanne's the one comparing yesterday to today saying, "Honey, we left the stage wearing more than some girls wear around the swimming pool today."

The doorman starts the show out with a big opening number. Michael Bennett is the emcee and the comic and our vision of him is sort of Pal Joey 30 years later. He's got a lot of lines of my father's, but also stuff my father would take and we've skewed it funny. My father had a routine with a dummy called the Bull Fighter. I took a few lines of that and we built a whole Western routine for Rusty and Buddy, which is Michael, to do a whole burlesque routine that segues into a number called "Ride 'em Cowboy." Our exotic act is Camille Leon the Lizard Lady--
Q: What's the premise?
A: The premise is that you wouldn't have all these star strips on one bill. First of all this is one of the smaller clubs, say down around the 600 - 700 block of Bourbon. The gangster that runs it is the nephew of the mob boss, he's lower echelon mafia and Rusty is his girl friend. The girls have been arrested for b drinking and obscenity and some of these lower life forms, as Rusty says, masquerading as human beings and running these clubs, aren't bailing the girls out. So they're starting a bail bond fund, the S.O.S. fund-Save Our Strippers-so that when these girls get arrested--
Q: So this is a benefit performance.
A: Yes. A benefit performance to start this fund up.
Q: But the benefit is happening inside the club--
A: The Club Toot Sweet. Because this is Rusty's idea and Rusty and the cashier, Miss B, who was Miss Bourbon Street of 1948 and now she makes costumes for the girls and keeps the books for the gangsters. So they've enticed the girls from the Show Bar and the Old French Opera House and the Moulin Rouge, all these star strips to come. And there's some rivalry among the girls.
Q: So that's your tension.
A: Toot Sweet is so small that the other star strip at the Club Toot Sweet is Dixie Lee Barrymore, the Bernhardt of Burlesque [Renee Maxwell], who also doubles as the camera girl and doesn't like doing it one bit.
Q: Is there a denouement?
A: Yes there is. You'll have to come see it.
Q: And we will--I can't wait! And thank you very much

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