Hey, Layyy-Deee, He’s Going To Broaaad-Wayyy
Famed funnyman and French cultural icon Jerry Lewis will make his Broadway debut on Feb. 28 in a revival of “Damn Yankees” - as the devil, no less.
The venerable musical is the story of a baseball fan who sells his soul in return for a major-league pennant.
“This is a role made in heaven,” the 69-year-old Lewis told reporters. “I’ve been typecast before, but this is really special.”
Why’s he doing it? “It’s my financial pleasure.”
What will he bring to the part? “Brilliance. There’s no humility in my family. I got it all.”
And after a career that’s spanned more than 60 movies, television and now the Great White Way, what’s left?
“The funeral, I guess.”
Loose talk
Roseanne, on current fiancee/ former bodyguard Ben Thomas: “I said my goal is to be married 10 or more times. Ben is so cool that I might have to divorce him and marry him several times.”
Guess he should have just stayed home and gone bowling
Lou Holtz turns 58 today.
Roseanne, on the other hand, taught him the crotch-grabbing
Former Staples Singers leader Mavis Staples says she used the mystery word “shum-mon” in a song long before Michael Jackson borrowed it for “Bad.” After hearing it on the radio, Staples’ mother called to say: “Mavis! This little Michael Jackson is using your word!”
Which in itself bears a striking similarity to ‘Disco Duck’
Jackson may have beaten several stateside plagiarism charges, but a judge has banned sales of his 1991 album “Dangerous” in Italy, ruling that the song was a blatant rip-off of Al Bano’s immortal “I Cigni di Balaka (The Swans of Balaka).”
If only the stupid song itself could be forgotten that easily
Rod Stewart says he was simply too drunk during a 1979 trip to Brazil to realize he was stealing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” from a popular tune in that country. “That song stuck in my head but I didn’t copy it on purpose,” he told a Brazilian newspaper. “I was with Elton John and we drank too much. I remember almost nothing from that trip.”
A hearse might have been more difficult to explain away
Stewart’s manager, Arnold Stiefel, insists Stewart wasn’t suffering from exhaustion when he exited a New Year’s Day concert in Rio de Janeiro in an ambulance. Stiefel said the unusual departure was arranged to protect the pop singer and maintain order in the recordsetting crowd of 3.5 million people.
Not to mention the fact that he’s a particularly purple prat
And speaking of Elton John, he manages to remember meeting the man who once was Prince: “It was a post-Grammys occasion, and I was quite inebriated. I’m quite shy, actually, or I used to be. And I went up to him and said, ‘I’m a big fan of your stuff,’ and he looked at me and just walked off … He’s a prat, but a clever prat.”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino