Producers: Raymond Katz, Sandy Gallin
(Isis Productions, Inc. which was Cher’s new production company)
Director: Art Fisher
(note Cher has gone back to the director of the first variety series, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Writers: Buz Kohan, Patricia Resnick, Cher, Rod Warren
Musical Director: Bill Conti
Choreographer: Dee Dee Wood
Art Director: Brian Bartholomew
Cher’s Gowns: Bob Mackie
(Cher kept her gown, hair and makeup people)
Costumes: Ret Turner
Makeup: Ben Nye, Jr.
Hair: Renata Leuschner
Aired: ABC,  April 3, 1978

Awards

  • Win: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Direction, Gregory Brunton
  • Nomination: Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program, Dolly Parton
  • Nomination: Outstanding Art Direction – Comedy-Variety Or Music Special, Brian C. Bartholomew

Guest Stars

  • Dolly Parton
  • Rod Stewart
  • The Tubes
  • Elijah Allman
  • Chastity Bono
  • Georgia Holt

Advertisements and promotional stuff

Opening: The screen is dark and we hear Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, addressing Cher as if she’s a little child, “Cher? Cher? Cher, is that you? I thought I told you not to mess up my record albums.”

Cher appears in long pigtails (I love Cher in long pigtails all the way back to “Big Yellow Taxi“), a white shirt, jeans and little-to-no makeup. She is crying. Georgia asks her what’s wrong. Cher cries and says she doesn’t want to talk about it.

Georgia keeps prodding until Cher says, “I’m not blonde! I don’t feel I’m gonna make it in life if I’m not blonde. You’re blonde and Georganne [Cher’s younger sister] is blonde. All the girls at school with boyfriends are blond with blue eyes and no vampire teeth or a bumpy nose!”

Georgia tells Cher she is beautiful in her own special way. Cher retorts, “I’m not! I’m ugly.”

And apparently Georgia really did tell this to Cher back in the day. She tells Cher that Cher may not think she’s the prettiest or the most talented but that she is special and someday she will believe this.

[Usually when Cher retells this motherly story, she says her mother told her “you might not be the prettiest or most talented…” but Georgia is clear to say this time “you may not think you are…” which is very different. In Cher’s version Georgia is acknowledging that Cher may not be the prettiest person. In Georgia’s version she indicates this is Cher’s opinion alone.]

Which is all very and truly heartbreaking to hear. Especially for Cher fans.

If you were to ask me when I was 4 years old, or 14 or 24 or 34 or 44 and I just turned 54, who the most beautiful woman in the world was, I would without any hesitation state Cher. I’ve never, ever, ever waivered on that point in 50 years. She sets the standard by which I judge the beauty of all woman (and the beauty of all men for that matter).

That Cher once thought with conviction that she was ugly is just sorrow-making!

For this reason alone, this is why this is the most important of the Cher television specials and variety shows. But there are many reasons. It just keeps getting better!

Cher goes on to tell her mother she’ll try to believe in herself and apologizes for not returning the West Side Story record she borrowed. She tells her mom that on the last day of school she plans to perform the musical and she was using her mom’s album to learn it.

Cher really did launch the full musical as a solo show in her childhood. She introduces us to the recreation of the event. This is West Side Story. “I will be playing all the parts.”

And it is awwweeesooome!

Cher’s West Side Story
(Broadway show 1957, motion picture 1961)

  • “Jet’s Song”
    Cher cross-dresses as four of the Jets. The different Cher Jets even cross over each other with their arms and you can’t see how they’re all edited together. A very good job of it. Cher always looks tiny when dressed as a boy. The wigs are great. They’ve even flattened Cher’s boobs out!
  • “Something’s Coming”
  • “I Feel Pretty” – Cher is adorable here. I love her falsetto voice. It’s hard to believe all the very high notes are actually Cher.
  • Tonight” (Video)
  • “Quintet”
  • “A Boy Like That; I Have a Love”
  • “Somewhere” (Video) – there’s some shadow fighting here. Cher really belts it out at then end. She really emotes. I love her version of this.

Even non-Cher fans are amazed by this thing. Mr. Cher Scholar’s comments while we were viewing it: “She’s awesome in this, fucking brilliant…it looks good for its time…she gets the Jets individual personalities and mannerisms…the choreography…her cross-dressing.”

Cher sings these Broadway songs well and probably produces some of the best acting we’ve seen in all the variety shows. (Cher was pitching to be an movie actor around this time but Hollywood was having none of it. It would take Robert Altman’s intervention to launch her acting career in the early 1980s.)

In fact, I would put this up with her very best performances. Just track her facial expressions. Right up there with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Mask and Moonstruck.

It’s also very impressive how they work out the scenes with multiple Chers and how they all sing and dance together.

The titles don’t roll until after this opus has completed and this trope of a delayed official beginning will carry through to her specials and concerts in the 1980s and beyond.

The multi-storied minimalist set is also used for the entire special.

Cher Explains: Cher returns to conclude her West Side Story story at her dressing table. This time she’s in a long, curly wig and much more glamourous makeup. She says the childhood performance wasn’t so hot, her hair didn’t dry and her saddle shoes where flapping. But she was noticed. This was a start. She says as a child she felt there was always a party happening out of her reach. (She felt left out.) This segues nicely into Dolly Parton’s guest spot…

Guest Solos:

  • Dolly Parton sings “Two Doors Down”
    They’ve turned the lower part of the stage into two apartments without walls but with a hallway between them. Dolly lives in the right-side apartment (Rod Stewart to the left) and she sits on the couch reading a magazine for a while as she sings, then she paces around a bit and then pours herself a drink from a small wet bar. Her apartment is appointed with 1970s-era wicker furniture. No voice could be as different from Cher’s as Dolly Parton’s voice is. She pure joy. Those dimples too! And another striking thing about her, none of her hits sound very much alike. This song sounds totally unique in her oeuvre.
  • Rod Stewart sings “Hot Legs.” The TimeLife set has cut out all the Rod Stewart from this special, even from the credits. These seems egregious to me, although it was likely a financial necessity. But he’s in all the ads! And I’m probably the last person to be asking for more Rod Stewart in something, but I find his omission here disheartening and I had to turn over my whole Cher she-shed last weekend to find my very poor bootleg copy of the special to piece together all the missing parts. Much of the appeal of this special is the weirdness of its juxtapositions, one of which is Rod Stewart doing his typical 1970s striptease in such close proximity to Dolly Parton. This isn’t the same special without that shock and awe. After Parton finishes her song, we pan across the hall to see Rod Stewart shirtless in red, presumably leather, pants with his bare chest covered with a long blue scarf (network TV, I guess) singing “Hot Legs” as he approaches a much more prodigious bar and pours himself a drink. He then puts on a silk white shirt and a white jacket and approaches Dolly Parton’s door. He has second thoughts and then returns to his own apartment. Parton then comes out of her apartment and walks up the stairs of their shared hallway. Rod Stewart then returns with a bottle of wine and starts to knock on her door but chickens out again. He goes back home. Dolly returns. Missed opportunities. This is how bad my bootleg is…

Cher and Laverne: Cher is back at her dressing table but this time Laverne appears in her mirror exclaiming, “Look at what the cat dragged in,” a very meta acknowledgment that they are the same person. Laverne really makes Cher laugh and she comes to appreciate Laverne’s quirky optimism. Laverne attempts to help Cher with Cher’s “comeback,” advising her to use “a little flash, a little glitter.”

Laverne says, “if you’re going to get your guacamole, you’ve got to dip your chips!” Earlier we learned that whenever Laverne dips her chips in the bowl, she always comes out with guacamole.

Finally, Laverne says, “what’s good for you is what’s good for me.” Truth.

Secretary at the Disco: Cher is seen in a typing pool office, typing away along with other women and they’re occasionally answering their phones. The whole thing is choreographed.  Cher is wearing a white blouse and her hair is in a bun. She’s wearing big, square glasses. When she picks up the phone she says, “Mr. Fisher’s office.” She also chants the vaguely frustrating text she’s typing: “In response to yours of the third, we regret that we are unable to respond to your request.”

Cher then looks through her lunch in a brown, paper bag which seems to consist of celery and carrots. Boring, she says. She flips through a rolodex. (For the kids, this is an old fashioned wheel with knobs at the sides and paper cards with contact information on them which you can flip through. It seemed like a good idea at the time.) Cher reads off the addresses in the Bs which devolves into her chanting boredom, boredom, boredom. Not an inaccurate depiction of some secretarial jobs. But I’ve always found mindless typing kind of hypnotic and I had a mindless typing job once at the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy in Stow, Massachusetts, where I was living for a few summer months with my brother and his wife at the time, Maureen.

Cher then starts reciting a poem!

Somewhere between tedium and terror,
a little to the east of fear and a little to the west of apathy,
there’s a space called me
and all the nine-to-fives, the mondays, the fridays,
the filing and the unfulfilling filling of time
smothers the me, smothers it in a blanket of blah,
beige blah;
and somewhere between a yawn and a scream,
a little to the north of anxiety and a little to the south of resignation,
is a space called free.
And in that space on a Saturday night
when the phones stop and the typewriters shut down
and the rolodexes stop rolling
the me and the free get it together.

We then see two feet in strappy heels strutting down a wet sidewalk. We cut to Cher walking through the  hallways of the set in her disco threads, the same dress seen in the blue poster at the very top of this review.

Cher can really do some dance moves now with confidence and sexiness. She doesn’t sing in this segment but a cover of “Disco Inferno” (The Trammps) plays in the background while a group of dancers do disco moves with Cher. Then, while a cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (Santa Esmeralda) plays, Cher and a man in a Saturday-Night-Fever white suit do the tango. We see them through shots from behind a high ceiling fan and dancing in slow motion. The dancers come back and they all dance to “Boogie Shoes” (K.C. and The Sunshine Band).

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “Boogie Shoes” have been cut from the TimeLife version. Which is a shame because the tango is very good.

Cher and Dolly In Conversation (Video)
Cher states that she’s been a friend of Dolly’s for a very long time but they never have time to just talk. Cher wears a short wig and a white dress. Dolly wears her Dolly wig of that era and a black dress. They sit on fainting couches. Their fictional conversation (about Dolly’s breakup) consists completely of song lyrics, which explains maybe why this skit was cut from the TimeLife set. I don’t know all of the song references, but the one’s I’ve identified are:

  • “Hello Dolly”
  • “The Way We Were”
  • “Bippity Boppity Boo” (which incidentally also makes an appearance in the 1979 Cher and Other Fantasies special)
  • “Leader of the Park”
  • “Back in the Saddle Again”
  • “That’s the Way (I Like It)”
  • “Oh, Lonesome Me”
  • “Personality” (there’s a boob joke after this one)
  • “D‐I‐V‐O‐R‐C‐E” (after this Cher joins Dolly on her couch)
  • “It’s My Party”
  • “Heartbreak Hotel”
  • “You’ve Got a Friend”
  • “I Got You Babe”

(Feel free to email me with missing references and I’ll add them here.)

Finale: The Musical Battle to Save Cher’s Soul (Audio with The Tubes edited out)
Now this is really somethin’ else. Impossible to describe. Utterly bizarre and something that could only transpire on a 1970s variety show.

Again, against a dark background we hear Cher singing “Sometimes I Feel Like  a Motherless Child,” the traditional spiritual, (actually a slave spiritual, first documented in the 1870s).

Dolly Parton then appears as an angel in to sing “People Get Ready” (The Impressions, 1965).

Cher wears a hot pink or purple (depending upon the quality of your copy) leotard with a matching wrap.  She dances around and sings “My Sweet Lord” (George Harrison, 1970). Dolly sings backup on the upper part of the set with a black chorus of angels. Cher makes her way up steps and Dolly reaches out her hand to Cher as she comes up. They clasp hands and then thunder strikes and The Tubes appear down below.

From the lower part of the stage, they sing their 1977 song “Smoke (La Vie en Fumer)” while Cher mills around among the band and dances with a male dancer. This is almost avant-garde for Cher, this Tubes thing! Fee Waybill sings and smokes and generally acts devilish. Women in flesh-colored leotards do handstands.

Then Dolly interjects and angelically sings bits of “Elijah Rock” (traditional spiritual), “Satan is a liar and a conjurer too; if you don’t look out, he’ll conjure you.”

The Tubes resume with their 1975 song “Mondo Bondage” and the set turns into acts of bondage. Cher dances with Fee Waybill while he sings. She looks very tiny next to him.

Finally, Cher decides to go the way of heaven as sings “Saved” (LaVerne Baker, 1960), which is one of my favorite songs Cher does in the 1970s. She sang it with Tina Turner and and Anthony Newley on episode #20 of the Cher show. Cher has thrown off her purple wrap at some point.

Cher is up on the higher level with Dolly and they sing “Oh, Happy Day” (The Edwin Hawkins Singers,1967) with the chorus. Cher’s got the wrap back on by the end.

Closing: “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” (Video)
From the movie Cinderella (1950)
Cher wears jeans and an off-the-shoulder white top. She says she has the same vampire teeth and bumpy nose she had as a child, (but not for long; she’ll straighten her nose and teeth in-between Mask and Witches of Eastwick). She says Chastity and Elijah are both blonde and don’t have the advantages of having black hair.

We hear Chastity’s voice over saying, Mom, you’ve been in my records again! Where’s my KISS album? which is our reminder that Cher is dating Gene Simmons in 1978. She sings the song and then her son Elijah Blue toddles up and she puts him up on her leg and shows him a yellow flower while he emotes and the credits roll.

 

Missing: The Farewell Tour DVD only has the West Side Story segment. The TimeLife is missing any reference to Rod Stewart, the Dolly/Cher lyrics conversation and the last two songs of the disco number, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “Boogie Shoes.” The only way you can see this full amazing show is from bootlegs.

Highlights: Cher’s personal introductions, her fabulous tour de force  West Side Story, her tango in the disco segment, the saving of her soul through a medley of weirdness. What a beautiful, joyful poster, too. One of my favorites. One of the best moments of Cher television in the 1970s, a hint of the next decade of Cher in movies.

More promotional pictures of Cher and Dolly: