BOOTLEG FILES 903: “Monteith and Rand” (1979 Showtime special starring the comedy team of John Monteith and Suzanne Rand).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
Last week, I saw a headline in the New York Times that said: “Suzanne Rand, Half of a Once-Popular Comedy Team, Dies at 75.” And my reaction to this news was: “Who?” I am not trying to be snarky or cruel, I honestly had no idea who she was. Upon reading the article, I discovered she was part of Monteith and Rand, a comedy team that was active in the late 1970s and the 1980s. But even though I was an active consumer of entertainment during those years – yes, I am that old – for the life of me I could not remember a comedy team called Monteith and Rand.
In researching this act, I discovered that Monteith and Rand were part of the improvisational orbit that shaped the comedy in the 1970s – both were part of the Boston area’s comedy revue The Proposition, and later he was in Second City’s Toronto outlet and she was with the Chicago group. When they teamed, their act started to gain steam with prominent Manhattan club gigs and an Off-Broadway show that inspired producer James Lipton – yes, the guy with the “Inside the Actor’s Studio” program – to put them on Broadway in 1979.
Unfortunately, the Broadway production only generated polite reviews and the show limped along for 79 performances before closing. However, the show caught the attention of the producers at the under-the-radar Showtime cable television network which agreed to present a one-shot special based on their Broadway show. New York City’s fabled Ed Sullivan Theater was the setting for this production.
In watching the Showtime special “Monteith and Rand,” one gets a crash course of their act with Rand as the more exuberant and free-spirited of the pair, while Monteith provided an air of authority and maturity, with an occasionally subversive injection into the proceedings.
The Monteith and Rand shtick consisted of a mix of pre-determined sketches and improvisational routines where the audience would suggest scenarios and the duo would whip up comic situations to meet those recommendations. The sketches had a strange habit of feeling overlong, with relatively minimal mirth along the way until a boffo final punchline that made the meandering worthwhile. This was most obvious in a singles bar sketch where Rand is a woman irritated that Monteith is trying to pick her up, only to discover to her delight that he’s gay. “You thought I was some kind of straight macho pig?” he asks, initially delighted to have her conversational acquaintance before he summons up the nerve to declare he wants to see what life is like as a heterosexual. I won’t give a spoiler reveal of the final joke – it came out of nowhere and it was worth the lengthy and often tedious build up to the sign-off remark.
Likewise, another sketch found Monteith and Rand as a posh British couple at a dance. They discover they knew each other from an earlier time in their lives – though the nature of their relationship is another comic surprise that will be ruined with a spoiler reveal. I also liked what seemed to be a riff on “The $25,000 Pyramid” that actually turned out to be something much more serious than a game show challenge.
And there is the blackout sketch with Monteith feigning a Western Union telegram delivery by calling out “Mammogram for Mrs. Eckmann” – again, revealing the punchline would be unfair to the newbie viewer.
As for the audience suggestions for their improvised skits, those sequences were more clever than funny. Thomas Lask, who reviewed the Monteith and Rand act when it was playing Off-Broadway, said it best about the team: “To be sure, some of their material is likely to stick in the mind more than others.”
Sadly, this Showtime special made no impact with audiences – which was no surprise, since at the time most homes did not have this cable network. And it didn’t help that Monteith and Rand were mostly absent from television – outside of a pair of appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” in the late 1970s and three half-hour PBS specials in the mid-1980s, most Americans never got to see their act. They never recorded comedy albums or ventured into films, and by the 1980s there were fewer variety and talk shows that were willing to devote time to their distinctive act.
Monteith and Rand continued performing in club and theater dates through the 1980s before parting in the early 1990s. Monteith taught improvisation at the HB Studio in Manhattan for many years before passing away in 2018 while Rand did voice-over work for advertisers and worked with Summer Salt, a group of writers and improvisers, in the years before her death was announced last week.
Not surprisingly, the Showtime special is mostly forgotten. An unauthorized posting is on YouTube, which offers the only recording of Monteith and Rand at the prime of their brief but entertaining years together.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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