Its time to change channels.
After more than a year of kneecapped theater watched from from couches and desktops, Bay Area stages are coming back to life. There will be limited, socially distanced seating for a while longer, but there will also—finally—be the buzz and breath of audiences and performers sharing a room, the feedback loop of laughter and gasps, that damn guy snoring in the row behind you. Ah, the humanity!
Its strangely fitting that one of the last major virtual productions to emerge in the San FrancisCovid-era is a cheeky salute to at-home entertainment. Don’t Touch That Dial!— which will stream every weekend in June—is a lighthearted, slickly produced musical revue celebrating that earwormiest of genres, the television theme song.
Created and hosted by local stage stalwarts DC Scarpelli and Peter Budinger, the 70-minute program features over two dozen performers setting aside the likes of Sondheim for less-esteemed musical oeuvres created under the auspices of Norman Lear (All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude), Garry Marshall (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley) and other prime time producers. Sung in full and in medleys, there are a whopping 22 theme songs in Don’t Touch That Dial stretching from The Patty Duke Show to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
“We’d been playing with the idea of doing a show like this for a long time,” said Budinger in a recent interview with the Bay Area Reporter, “When the pandemic hit and productions we were scheduled to perform in were cancelled or postponed, we decided to go for it.”
Budinger and Scarpelli, a couple who first met as members of an undergrad improv comedy group at Yale University are hardcore theater lovers today, but they both admit to spending much of their late ‘70s/early ‘80s suburban childhoods transfixed by the tube.
“We were such vidiots,” recalls Scarpelli with a laugh. “I was so pathologically attached to my favorite shows; I remember running into the kitchen yelling the big news when I first saw that Phylicia Ayers-Allen had changed her name to Phylicia Rashad in the credits of The Cosby Show.”
In casting their show, Budinger and Scarpelli, both in their late 40s, quickly realized that their personal Golden Age of television was ancient history to many of the cast members still in their 20s and 30s. “There’s not much that makes you feel your age,” admits Scarpelli, “Like someone who has never heard the Brady Bunch theme.”
Of course, such unawareness of the source material can lead to interesting interpretations, like what Budinger describes as “a kind of punk version of the theme from The Greatest American Hero.”
In a painstaking multi-step production process, the show’s songs were all reorchestrated and recorded as guide tracks by music director Daniel Thomas, then distributed to performers who used them to create vocal tracks which were then mixed with fully produced instrumentals. Sequences were filmed on stage at the Gateway Theater, in Budinger and Scarpelli’s ad hoc garage-based green screen studio and in some individual performers home spaces.
While their TV tribute is the capstone of 16 months offstage, Budinger and Scarpelli—like so many artists and audience members—are looking forward to finally getting back to live performance later this year. They’ve both been cast in the 42nd Street Moon production of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. As Sonny Curtis once sang to footage of downtown Minneapolis: “We’re gonna make it after all.”
