I’m so happy to finally be premiering an episode of “Broadway is My Beat.” This is one of the earliest shows I fell in love with. But my struggle with Madison was how to keep in the beautiful noir monologues. In “The Adventures of Philip Marlowe” I’d already rewritten Marlowe’s monologues for Madison. That was fun making modern references within the descriptions. Or in “Rogue’s Gallery” when Madison was half in/half out of Richard Rogue, and found herself unwittingly saying his misogynistic monologues verbatim. But I love the writing of Morton Fine and David Friedkin too much to rewrite them and make them funny. I certainly couldn’t cut the monologues out, that would completely deflate the core of the series! So… how?
I will tell you I sat on this a long time. Truthfully, I wanted to do “Broadway is My Beat” in season one! I also found this same obstacle with “The Six Shooter” since that series is very monologue heavy (hey, you’ve got Jimmy Stewart, why not use him!) But that one was a bit easier since I could alter the dialogue to include him saying funny things about Madison’s behavior, and I actually wrote out a few of the scenes Ponset in the original was merely describing.
Then I was thinking about how I’d handled the monologues in “The Birds” last Halloween. Again, such great monologues that were technically Madison’s (as she stepped into the leading role) but would totally destroy the tone if she did them either in a rewrite or in her voice. So I got the fabulous and ever spooky Edward October to do the monologues. Could I do that with Danny Clover? Another obstacle is that I really don’t like to repeat “gimmicks” in the episodes. So what could I do that I hadn’t done yet?
Then I came up with the idea of Madison hearing Danny in her head while she presented as Danny to everyone she meets. So I could get the fabulous David Pinion to voice for Danny, leaving the monologues in tact, while letting Madison drive the story by stepping in as Danny in the scenes. Which actually helped clean up my concerns of how to insert Madison into “Broadway is My Beat” altogether. Danny doesn’t have a partner. He’s got support from Tartaglia and Muggavan, but it would’ve been some serious contorting to wedge Madison into the stories with Danny. Especially because this gritty drama would never have had a female detective. And at this point, I prefer to have Madison drive the stories, rather than early on when she would be mostly a snarky side character. It’s much more fun to have her in the center of the story. And I did think this was a different enough version of “Quantum Leap” which she did in “The Green Hornet” when she physically embodied Britt Reid since that was a device to showcase Kato.
I’m very happy with how this one came out. I also really like this particular episode. While a lot of surprise endings or twists in old time radio are easy to spot since we’ve seen those same devices used frequently over the last seventy years or so (even though these twists were new back then!) I did find this ending genuinely surprising and hope you all did, too! And I hope you enjoyed the words of Fine and Friedkin. I was a huge “I, Spy” fan (thank you Nick-at-Nite) and was thrilled to learn they were the writers of “Broadway is My Beat.” Clearly, I am a big fan of their work.
-Chrisi (aka Madison)
