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Private Notes
This was Robin's first HBO special, part of the HBO On Location series. It was taped on location at the Roxy Theatre in Hollywood in 1978.
This special is also called 'Off the Wall' but the official title is 'Live at the Roxy'.
Stand-up comic Robin Williams performs his act in San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. Although he does do some of his more well known routines, much of the footage is devoted to Williams' frenetic, completely off the wall improvisation.
With Robin Williams at the cusp of what would become a very successful film career, A Night at the Met served as a kind of standup swan song for him. A Night at the Met found Williams full of the same energy and maniacal pace that endeared him to his audience in the first place -- only, this time, the fuel was strictly internal. Overcoming addiction left Williams with a smorgasbord of hilarious and poignant material at his disposal and his wry and intelligent musings on the dangers of overindulgence held extra weight, because he had been there.The sentimental and the hilarious reached a crescendo when the subject matter turned to the birth of his son. Among the pregnancy and pee jokes, Williams injected serious concerns for the future with a glimmer of hope that all might not be as dismal as it seemed. Hilarious, poignant, outrageous, and heartwarming, A Night at the Met came at a unique time -- capturing Robin Williams at both his career and personal best.
Sharper and deeper than Robin Williams's previous road material, Live on Broadway is a mature comedian's view of all things to do with power, prejudice, and paranoia in the 21st century. On the anthrax scare of 2001: "The Senate cleared out of their building but told the rest of us, 'Get on with your normal lives!'" On his solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem: "Time share!" On the pitfalls of America's deepening alliance with Britain: "The House of Commons is like Congress with a two-drink minimum." A viewer may have to slog through Williams's tedious breast fetishism, but patience is quickly rewarded with bitchy takes on Martha Stewart facing prison, solid satire about French existentialist judges at the Olympics, and subversive op-eds about the Bush administration's inability to clarify terrorist threats to the public ("Has the CIA become the Central Intuitive Agency?").
In this comedy special taped at DAR Constitution Hall, his first solo special on the network in seven years, Williams covers such topics as global warming, sex and politics, the state of health care in the country (suggesting a cash for clunkers program for elderly relatives, among other things), drugs - recreational and otherwise - and more personal topics, including his recent heart surgery.
