George Daugherty bugs out

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The humble art of the animated cartoon has had a long and fairly amicable relationship with the world of classical music. An early milestone was Walt Disney's Fantasia, released in 1940, a clumsy but pretty attempt at interpreting the works of Bach, Dukas and Mussorgsky. More recently, a Saturday morning staple of the turn of the '80s was The Smurfs, which left Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" ringing in the ears of a generation of rugrats.

The most successful efforts were on the part of the team at the Warner Brothers' studios during the golden years of Bugs, Daffy and the esteemed Mr. Fudd. In 1989, Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary, composer and conductor George Daugherty saw fit to assemble a truly ambitious tribute, one that has since packed such humble venues as the Hollywood Bowl and the Sydney Opera House in Australia. When the 54 members of Montreal's Orchestre Gala Philarmonique finish tuning up for this summer's first presentation of Bugs Bunny on Broadway, the wascally wabbit will once again grace the silver screen.

Only the sorry few denied the miracle of television during their childhood will draw a blank at titles like What's Opera, Doc? and Rhapsody Rabbit, artful satires of classical music's grandiose pretenses. Bugs and company rampaged through the compositions of Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Rossini, leaving those dignified works in tatters and audiences in tears. Daugherty agrees that director Chuck Jones, himself a guest of Just For Laughs a few years ago, is largely responsible for the spirit of the high velocity hijinks. "Jones had a love and a real feeling for this kind of classical music parody," says Daugherty. "He got a real kick out of the sacrosanct pomposity that classical musicians sometimes hold themselves in. He decided he was the one to let the air out of that balloon. The thing is, he did it with such wit and style that no one could be offended."

Restoring the prints of Jones's films was a difficult task, but not nearly as daunting as the aural overhaul the project demanded. The original scores by Carl Stalling and Milt Franklin gleefully pillaged works such as Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and Rossini's The Barber of Seville, pasting the fragments together in a chaotic counterpoint to the idiocy on screen. Timing is everything in comedy, and so absolute precision was necessary for Bugs Bunny on Broadway to hit its mark. The painstaking process of transcription for orchestra was complicated further by the addition of sound effects, essential elements of the sonic rhythm of each piece. The Warner vaults were ransacked for the original sound samples, which were then cleaned up and digitally reassembled.

Dropping in the dialogue posed an even greater problem. Mel Blanc, the man who gave the Warner characters their voices, died during the planning stages of the project. Daugherty, a stickler for authenticity, balked at the notion of anyone sitting in for Blanc. That left no option but to drag in what was at the time cutting edge technology to carefully separate Blanc's vocal tracks from the rest of the racket. "When Mel died," he explains, "I said 'We're going to do it this way or we're not going to do it.'"

Daugherty's perseverance has more than paid off. Since the debut of Bugs Bunny on Broadway in San Diego in 1990, the show has packed houses at every stop. What bowled Daugherty over wasn't just the sheer number of people willing to play along with his harebrained scheme, it was the average age of those crowds. "We were expecting this audience of largely families," Daugherty recalls of the opening night, "with lots of kids running around. When I peeked around the curtain, to my absolute astonishment, the crowd was ten percent kids and ninety percent adults." Or ninety percent kids disguised as grown ups, one is inclined to suspect.

Bugs Bunny on Broadway runs Saturday, July 19-21 at the Labatt Blue Music Hall in the Old Port.

9:30pm (except July 20, 10:30pm). $10 (includes access to the Old Port site)