Rush will be making their first U.S. television appearance in more than thirty years on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”
The Canadian band Rush, which hasn’t performed on U.S. television in more than three decades, will play their classic “Tom Sawyer” on the Comedy Central show Wednesday (11:30 p.m. EST). The Geddy Lee-led trio, which is currently on tour, hasn’t played on U.S. television since 1975.
Rush is only the latest act to perform on “The Report,” which has steadily edged closer to “Ed Sullivan Show” territory. With increasingly frequent musical performances, “The Report” has grown a variety-show impulse, evident in other upcoming bookings. The rapper Nas will perform on July 23, Toby Keith will return for a second performance on July 28 and Crosby, Stills and Nash will play on July 30.
The Stephen Colbert-hosted comedy show was originally launched as a parody of conservative political punditry — and shows like “The O’Reilly Factor” do not make a habit of hosting music performances. But “The Report” circus has expanded into musical realms, often with its sonorous host joining in. John Legend, Neil Young, R.E.M., Tony Bennett, Peter Frampton, Willie Nelson, Barry Manilow, John Mellencamp, the Roots and Carole King have all performed on the show.
Cool. Here’s a video of Rush playing “Tom Sawyer,” albeit not on “The Colbert Report.”
TIME is having readers chose “The Most Influential People of the Year – The TIME 100″ from a list of 200 candidates.
Here’s the early voting:
Bhumibol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, is leading the pack at the moment, followed by Korean pop singer Rain, comedian Stephen Colbert, Shigeru Miyamoto (the guy who designed the Nintendo Wii), and J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter author), the singer Bono, and rising hockey star Sidney Crosby.
I am somewhat skeptical of the methodology. At least President Bush is beating out former American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar. Of course, when Howard Stern (currently high on the list himself) weighs in, that might change.
Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose show business career spanned seven decades, has died at the ripe old age of 96.
Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose long career spanned Broadway, opera, television and film, including the classic Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera,” has died at age 96, her son said Wednesday. Christopher Hart said his mother had been in and out of the hospital since contracting pneumonia over the Christmas holidays. “She passed away peacefully” at home, said Hart. “She had such a wonderful life, and a great long run, it was a blessing.”
Hart had appeared for years on the popular game show “To Tell the Truth” as a celebrity panelist.
[...]
Well known for her starring role as Rosa Castaldi in the 1935 movie “A Night at the Opera,” her other film credits included: “She Loves Me Not” and “Here Is My Heart,” both opposite Bing Crosby; Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”; and “Six Degrees of Separation.” She began her acting career on Broadway in “Champagne Sec,” and went on to appear in many other Broadway productions, including the 1984 revival of “On Your Toes.” She made her operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967 in “Die Fledermaus,” and created the role of Lucretia in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Rape of Lucretia.”
From 1956 to 1967, she appeared on the CBS prime-time game show “To Tell the Truth” with host Bud Collyer and fellow panelists such as Polly Bergen, Johnny Carson, Bill Cullen and Don Ameche. The show featured three contestants, all claiming to be the same person. The panelists asked them questions to determine which was telling the truth. (The popular show also had runs, sometimes including Hart, in daytime and in syndicated versions.)
[...]
“I think television had more of an influence on my life than the movies because with television you came into somebody’s home,” Hart replied. “People remember me from television. They don’t even remember me from ‘A Night at the Opera.’ They have no idea that I played the lead and did all the singing. But they do remember television, particularly ‘To Tell the Truth.’”
That’s the nature of the medium. Indeed, I watched “To Tell the Truth” quite often as a kid in the early 1970s and had no idea that she was famous for anything but the show. That was apparently the second iteration of the show, which ran in syndication from 1969-1978.
Sick and tired of souped-up cars with loud engines and pulsing music? Barry Manilow may be the answer. Officials in one Sydney district have decided to pipe the American crooner’s music over loudspeakers in an attempt to rid streets and car parks of hooligans whose anti-social cars and loud music annoy residents and drive customers from businesses. Following a successful experiment where Bing Crosby music was used to drive teenage loiterers out of an Australian shopping center several years ago, Rockdale councilors believe Manilow is so uncool it might just work.
Of course, this might be considered cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the 8th Amendment in the United States. Is there nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that prevents this sort of thing?
Update: OTB Commenters John Burgess and Donald Sensing observe that the Noriega story is apocryphal and that the music was blared to prevent media eavesdropping on negotiations, not–as widely reported–to drive Noriega nuts.
