A TOP BANANA GLORIES IN CLASSIC BURLESQUE

Eight years ago, when E. E. (Ed) Bell settled in Southern California to pursue a comedian’s career, he decided he would avoid two things as a performer--taking a pie in the face and playing in drag.

So what is Bell doing eight performances a week as the chief comic in “Sugar Babies,” the rowdy, ribald show now at the Grand Dinner Theatre in Anaheim?

You guessed it.

As the frenetic, garrulous top banana--the role that Mickey Rooney created in the Los Angeles and New York productions--Bell is (A) creamed by a pie and (B) does a solo turn as a damsel named Hortense.

Ah, but that’s burlesque.

It’s a chance for the rotund Bell to run amok on stage, dressed most of the time in superbaggy pants, chase voluptuously flirty chorines and make teasing asides to the audience.

And a chance to pass on--or be the butt of--some of the most outrageously corny off-color jokes.

First man: Tell me, is that Hortense?

Second man: I dunno, she looks pretty relaxed to me.

Bell, a knockabout comic at heart, loves every slap-happy moment of it.

At 30, Bell has an encyclopedic knowledge about the famed old-time comedians of vaudeville, Broadway, Hollywood and early television, as well as burlesque. His idols cover the gamut, from Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and Ed Wynn to Jack Oakie, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason.

With his hefty figure, Bell has specialized in funnyman roles in stage musicals, including “Guys and Dolls,” “The Music Man” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” He has portrayed buffoons in gaslight melodramas at Knott’s Berry Farm. He has done stand-up comedy, most recently at the Crackers nightclub in Anaheim.

But never burlesque.

After all, the heyday of burlesque and its big-time theater chains was 60 years ago, and municipal crackdowns plus the rise of new entertainment competition had driven most “burly” theaters from the scene by the 1950s. The strip houses that survived, Bell said, are the ones that have given burlesque its sleazy image today.

Burlesque may be dead, and in the opinion of many, deservedly so. But others, including Bell, contend that burlesque at its best had its moments of glory.

“It’s a real comedy legacy. The people that came out of burlesque are a who’s who--Fannie Brice, Bert Lahr, W.C. Fields, Bobby Clark, Abbott & Costello, Phil Silvers,” said Bell, who lives in Long Beach and is a musical-comedy regular on the Orange County dinner-playhouse circuit.

“We don’t play it (‘Sugar Babies’) as parody. Forget burlesque’s reputation today. Now it’s known as striptease and not much else. But to us, ‘Sugar Babies’ is homage to when burlesque was a comedian’s paradise.”

The Grand’s version, which runs through Feb. 1, is billed as the first dinner theater version of the original 1979 Ralph G. Allen-Harry Rigby production.

Like the big-city versions with Rooney and tap-dance queen Ann Miller, the Grand’s “Sugar Babies” retains all the driving pace, all the sexual foolery of “classic” burlesque--from hotel, courtroom and schoolhouse skits that date back to the late 1800s to the bump-and-grind turns and bosomy extravaganzas.

To Bell and others in the Grand cast--which includes Madilyn Clark, Joe Shea, Bill Mullikin, Lon Huber and Marleta Marrow--the show should be treated as pure nostalgia.

Burlesque, they argued, wasn’t meant to be viewed as societal satire, even though some critics have derided burlesque’s use of crude ethnic stereotypes and its depiction of women as feather-brained and sexual playthings.

“Gloria Steinem wouldn’t like me saying this, but I don’t mind the (female) stereotypes in this show. It’s done strictly for fun and it reflects another era,” said Clark, who performs the Ann Miller role, which includes playing the dumbstruck foil of the male comics.

Nor, some Grand performers argued, was burlesque in its heyday particularly offensive.

“Look at movies and television today, the (sexual) stuff they do is stronger than anything you’ll see in our show. Hey, we’re pretty tame by comparison,” said Shea, 48, the Grand’s second-banana comic. (Shea played briefly in a Baltimore burlesque house back in the 1960s).

Indeed, Bell blames much of burlesque’s present image of disrepute on misconceptions.

“Sure, burlesque was very elementary. No one is saying it wasn’t. But it was the working man’s entertainment. It had a certain exuberance about it. It wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously,” Bell said.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Critics are always knocking something that’s populist entertainment, that’s a little bit silly and doesn’t carry any messages.”

Or offers yaks for the ages, like this exchange from “Sugar Babies”:

Second banana: What’s the difference between mash potatoes and pea soup?

Top banana: That’s easy. I can mash potatoes.