As soon as the style of the play's nominal star, Kathie Lee Gifford, makes it clear that genuine comic attitude will turn into performing attitude while she's around, one begins to detect the incompatibility between collaborative lightness and star tripping.
"And then I turned into a performing dick," he wrote in the foreword to his lyric book Jake's Progress in 1977.
He was saying something far more important: that we need to have a Plan B, and artists should think very carefully about turning themselves into performing seals who jump through whatever hoops that government or those in power erect in order to get funding.
For his Philadelphia engagement, Bell had been booked into the Baptist Temple — which, he discovered, with some relief, had been deconsecrated and turned into a performing-arts center.
"Investors rate servicers based on their ability to keep loans in a performing state and to turn nonperforming loans into performing loans," he said.
Even a band like the Stones, who announced their summer tour plans in the Bronx on Tuesday, have turned into a tribute band, performing their old repertoire as if they really were the Rolling Stones, when everyone knows they're not.
I am sure my fellow Guardian scribbler Polly Toynbee is proud, and rightly so, of having Hard Work – her account of living in social housing, claiming benefits and working for the minimum wage – turned into a play, recently performed at the Edinburgh festival.
Hedge funds are beginning to recover from the huge losses they suffered last year, as May turned into one of the best performing months in history.
Ricky's character started as the athletic little brother and turned into a musical heartthrob, often performing with his band on the show.
By the end, sprinklers have turned the performing space into a sizeable pond in which the five dancers frolic, stamp and loll, making fearsome waves as they scoot across the floor on their stomachs.
Plainly, the "State of" rigmarole has been turned into a ritual that is performed every year for the politicians' greater glory.
