Romania screens a Bernstein parody
OrchestrasIn 1974, when Lenny was still the toast of New York, Romanian TV commissioned a comedian to send him up.
Not very successfully, unless there’s a Romanian joke we are missing.
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Well, not quite sure what to say! Didn’t hear the audience laugh, either!
He looks like a cross between Rowan Atkinson and Lino Ventura.
Something like 8 years later, when Lenny was taking Vienna by storm, Maxi Boehm impersonated him much more lovingly and successfully. You can catch a glimpse here (about 29 minutes into the documentary). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1D9UVOrcBU
One wonders why they bothered, as he had yet to conquer Vienna, so he couldn’t have been so well known in Bucharest – so one assumes this was antisemitic propaganda.
The comedician, Toma Caragiu, wrote that he got beaten up during the war time many times by the Nazis because he was generally thought to be a Jew.
He and his father worked at a Jewish restaurant during this time when most people tried to avoid dealings with the Jewish population.
I can assure you that he had no anti-Semitic thoughts whatsoever.
Is it about Bernstein? The description accompanying the video doesn’t mention him.
LOL. It is very funny. Rather in a Pythonesque, absurd way, to give you a reference you know. A silly pop song is being deconstructed with the very pompous sagacity of a classical conductor.
it didn’t take much to make a population miserable with communism laugh.
The funniest music parody I know of is Dick Shawn doing a sixties rock star in The Producers.
https://youtu.be/BkYBJId7WZs
Ha, ha!
The punchline: The conductor is commenting that, after listening the music composed by his sweetheart (the song sung previously by Margareta P. and then presented in symphonic version by
the orchestra), a soldier refused to be discharged from the army.
Both the “conductor” and the singer were colleagues playing Brecht ( The 3 penny opera), in a famous theatre, “Bulandra”, in Bucharest in 1964. And yes, Bernstein’s music lessons on American TV were broadcast in Eastern Europe during that Socialist epoch.
Toma Caragiu was a great actor who tragically died on 4th March 1977, during a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. He was a genius in both tragical and comical genre.
The “conductor” played in an antifascist movie (1975). Toma Caragiu impresonates here a great actor from a previous generation (1945) called Constantin Tanase, who was using satire to criticize the government and fascist forces during the war. Tanase was a prominent force in Bucharest’s cultural landscape with a nightly show and his courage in speaking our against fascism almost cost him his life. “The Actor and the Savages”.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071101/plotsummary/
His credentials are spotless, as I think you know already.
I think you should be a good speaker of Romanian, and have a good knowledge period and the regime when this was done, something like living through it, in order to judge it. Toma Caragiu had a certain charisma, he was hilarious by just being and speaking, and struck a special cord in all of us who remember him.