Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504681
D. THE CURRENT MUSICAL PERFORMANCE STAGE. WILL HEATH/NBC. E. "DINER LOBSTER" SKETCH. WILL HEATH/NBC. our collaborative mentor is to understate the profound influence he had on all our lives, both personally and professionally. He brought each of us into his world and was so much more than a design colleague. In 1975, he envisioned a way of doing a late-night comedy show that almost fifty years later is at its core essentially done the same way, and it has had an effect on television history and our culture that will be everlasting. One of the more recent sketches Gene designed was "Diner Lobster" with host John Mulaney. It was a musical based on Les Miserables with Kenan Thompson as a Jean Valjean lobster who is shockingly about to be boiled having been unexpectedly ordered from the menu. John's waiter announces the order and suddenly the upstage walls part and a giant lobster tank sleds forward with Kenan singing, "Who Am I?" Then the side walls split open and a barricade of carts, lobster traps, netting, etc., is pulled in by the cast singing in unison dressed in French revolutionary costumes. As the sketch builds to a marching musical finale, the character played by Pete Davidson who'd ordered the lobster that started it all proclaims, "This diner has amazing set design." ADG E D