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MAXINE TAKES ON TINSELTOWN TV
GUIDE NETWORK When
you're a gay woman who started doing stand-up at 14 and ended up
producing some of TV's top sitcoms you're bound to have some stories
to tell. And that's just what Maxine Lapiduss does in Situation
Tragedy: Observations on 10 Years in Hollywood…With Bongos,
a musical that opens at Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood, CA, on
Saturday, September 27. "It grew out of experiences that have
happened to me-some exaggerated for dramatic and comedic purposes,"
says Lapiduss, a former staffer at Dear John, Home Improvement
and Roseanne who currently works as a consulting producer
on Ellen. "One of the songs we do is 'The Next Big Hippest
Thing,' and it's about trying to sell a series to a networks and
how the process changes every five seconds. By the time you end
up selling them something, it's completely by committee -- a camel
that has a horse's head and a zebra's tail and makes no sense. That
sort of answers the question of why there's so much bad stuff on
TV." Lapiduss, who started her career doing impressions of
Cher and Helen Reddy in Pittsburgh comedy clubs, is happy to be
back onstage. "When you work as a writer for so many years,
you find yourself thinking, 'Gee, I would like to say this myself
again.' There was some satisfaction in just having a thought and
putting it out there yourself instead of having to go through five
levels of executives." Now that Lapiduss has gone back to her
musical roots, does this mean we'll see song-and-dance number on
the coming season of Ellen? "We're not there quite yet,
but it's still early," says Lapiduss. "We've still got
22 episodes to do."
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