A dose of reality, 1950s style

It’s enough to make a network programmer burst into tears. With none of the partial nudity, vicious backstabbing and vermin consumption that fuels its small-screen counterparts, the Acme Comedy Theatre has pulled in a capacity crowd of hipsters on a Wednesday night to watch -- gasp! -- a low-tech, PG-rated reality show.

“It’s sort of our motto: Nobody gets voted off, nobody gets fired and nobody eats bugs,” explains host and co-producer J. Keith van Straaten.

He has subverted conventional wisdom by resurrecting the TV chestnut “What’s My Line?,” which ran on prime-time TV from 1950 to 1967, as a weekly stage production at the 99-seat theater. And he’s doing it without the campy sneer Hollywood usually applies to such retro ventures. “It’s like going into a time machine when things were a lot simpler,” says theatergoer Doug Prinzivalli, who’s there to see the show for the third time since it started in November. “It’s an homage more than a parody.”

As the show begins, Van Straaten, who previously hosted the Comedy Central game show “Beat the Geeks,” takes the stage in a gray suit and chunky glasses to explain the rules of the game. As in the original, a celebrity panel is given the task of guessing the occupations of a series of guests. Instead of the original’s stars of yore, like Dorothy Kilgallen and Steve Allen, tonight Ann Magnuson, Wil Wheaton, Annabelle Gurwitch and Rick Overton will be playing.

Although they’re given ample time to plug upcoming projects and personal websites at the beginning and end of the show, the panelists eagerly get down to business once the first guest (a rose grower) takes his seat. They scribble notes and furrow brows -- a Hollywood rarity in itself.

There are witty asides, but many of the laughs are accidental, as audience members (who are informed of the guest’s occupation before the game begins) watch the panel stumble blindly toward an answer that, to those in the know, seems obvious. “First and foremost, you have to take the game seriously,” Van Straaten says. “No matter how funny and charming you are, if you don’t play the game, you will never win the audience over.”

In addition to being charming while asking yes-no questions, the panel members are challenged to behave themselves, ‘50s-style.

“The original was very cosmopolitan, and the panel was suggesting, ‘This is how life would be if you were one of us,’ ” Van Straaten adds. “It may not be true now, and it may not have been true then, but it’s fun to re-create it when we can.”

To that end, women wear evening attire, the men don suits and ties, and the panel addresses one another as “Mr.” and “Ms.” After being introduced, Magnuson steps delicately to her chair in a lacy black 1950s cocktail dress, her hair in a demure updo. Wheaton, wearing a suit and tie, not only rises upon her entrance but also pulls back her chair. It could be a high school cotillion with better lighting, until Magnuson asks if the product the first guest sells is bigger than a breadbox.

“It depends,” the rose grower says, with a raised eyebrow. “How big is your breadbox?” Magnuson smiles, making a coy gesture toward her chest as the audience bursts into giggles.

That little gesture is as racy as the evening gets, and that’s fine with Van Straaten. “With no scripts, it’s very natural to go for innuendo and suggestive language,” he says. “But we try to say it’s much more fun when the audience can put it together in their minds on their own.”

The second guest of the evening is also the entertainment: He’s a professional musical saw player. Not surprisingly, he stumps the panelists, who get impressively close, guessing the washboard as his instrument of choice. When he breaks out his saw and bow for a rendition of “My Funny Valentine” -- which, Van Straaten informs us, was the favorite song of 1950-67 panelist Arlene Francis -- the crowd is hushed; not even an ironic snicker can be heard.

The entertainment segment is one way the live production is different from the original; on the TV show, guests never demonstrated their talents, an issue producer Gil Fates bemoaned in his 1978 book “What’s My Line? The Inside History of TV’s Most Famous Game Show.” With an hour to fill (the TV show was just 30 minutes), it’s a luxury Van Straaten can afford, as is convivial chat with each guest. “The secret to our show is that it’s actually a variety show and a talk show combined, then disguised as a game show,” he says.

But he tries to drop in subtle details from the original to appeal to “WML?” devotees like Prinzivalli, who watches the original on the Game Show Network. In addition to fun facts about the original show’s panelists, he’s included guests with ties to the past. To wit: Ed Begley Jr., whose father appeared on the show in the 1950s, was a recent mystery guest.

There’s even an old-fashioned commercial break for the show’s sponsor, Auction Doctors Inc., in which Van Straaten acts out a skit with his co-host, Claudia Dolph, who also provides the evening’s Vanna White-esque hand flourishes.

After failing to identify the third guest (a heart surgeon), the panel donned blindfolds for the final “mystery guest,” always a recognizable face. Tonight, it’s Lindsay Wagner, who elicits a whoop of excitement from the crowd. Though she valiantly tries to disguise her voice as that of a little old lady, Wheaton eventually outs the Bionic Woman.

After the show, most of the audience clusters in the lobby, talking about the good old days of reality TV.

“My friends said, ‘If you like “Match Game,” you’ll love this,’ ” writer Dennis Hensley says.

He should know: Hensley has hosted his own retro theatrical version of “Match Game,” cheekily titled “The Mismatch Game,” for years (it returns to Hollywood’s Renberg Theatre on Friday and Saturday). “Mismatch” tweaks its inspiration further than “WML?”: Actors play the familiar faces of the ‘70s (Tony Tripoli as Charles Nelson Reilly, Ted Biaselli as Tony Randall), and the innuendo is replaced with racy humor that would never get past a TV censor.

Ultimately though, the two shows are more similar than different, stemming from nostalgia for a time when reality show contestants didn’t have to eat squid guts to impress us.

“Watching these as a kid, it always made being a grown-up look like so much fun,” Hensley says and sighs. It’s not something anyone’s ever likely to say about “Fear Factor.”

*

‘What’s My Line?’

Where: ACME Comedy Theatre, 135 N. La Brea Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays

Price: $12

Contact: (323) 525-0202; acmecomedy.com, jkeith.net