I only have info from Mary's book and then what a few fans have chimed in about
the act was booked at Caesar's for Dec 1976. but as the opening act for comedian Alan King. so they only had a short stage time, about 25 mins or so. apparently it was a rather last minute booking but because it was at one of the top hotels on the strip, they took it
Mary goes on to say that Pedro demanded Motown come up with some money to refresh the act and they finally did. she says Gil worked on the new song arrangements and then George Faison, a broadway choreography, did the new staging. here's info on George:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Faison
She states that george came up with the idea of the Hair spoof. in the musical hair, there's a segment called Black Boys/White Boys. the Black Boys number is sung by three white women singing things like "black boys are delicious" then 3 black women a la The Supremes sing White Boys "white boys are so pretty..." Apparently in the staging for the sup spoof, it is eventually revealed that the 3 black women are wearing 1 gown.
so it was a relatively well known spoof in the broadway show about the Supremes. sort of cute and all. Apparently George thought it would be fun for the supremes to spoof hair who had spoofed the Supremes. and to do it during the Greatest Hits segment of the show.
the problem is that the execution, from what i can tell, was just poorly done. on the bootleg tape, there's an announcer's voice talking about "welcome to our really big Shew! a big big Shew.... here are three little girls from detroit. the Superinos, the super dupers, etc" its sort of a Ed Sullivan spoof on "shew" and how he'd often mess up people's names and all. but what the heck does that have to do with hair!?!?! there was no acknowledgement in the act [[from what i've heard) that references the broadway show. nothing setting up the background for the upcoming spoof. the musical had closed on Broadway in 72 so this wasn't really even a contemporary show. it was pretty out of date by the time disco was around.
the medley of hits has Baby Love and Where Did our Love Go but the group messes these up. I believe Susaye was singing the lead to WDOLG while S and M are singing the backups for BL. or something like that. it also include YKMHO, NBH, LILAIIMH. and each of those songs contain phrases like "set me free" "you keep me hanging on" "i can't break away" "tearing it all apart"
i've never seen the gown itself. Brad has joked on here that while he was helping Mary with the dresses for the gown coffee table book, the two of them were struggling to figure out how the hell the dress worked, what went where, etc. he said it's bright red.
so you end up with a Greatest Hit medley with the girls in this bizarra uni-dress, supposedly spooking an out of date broadway show but with no explanation or info to help audience members make that connection. and then if they were emphasizing those phrases around break away, tearing all apart, set me free, etc, i wonder if they were playing around in the gown, trying to "break away" from each other? i wasn't there so i don't know...
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