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The zany spoof show, which has run since 1974 and claims to be the longest-running musical revue in the world, will play its final performances on New Year’s Eve, the producer announced Wednesday.
“I just felt it was time — after 45 years, it was the right time to close,” said producer, Jo Schuman Silver. “It’s better for us to go out on top than to drag this out.”
The pun-and-sight-gag-filled show has a feather-thin plot — Snow White, looking for love, wanders the world encountering famous people who sing pop song parodies, often about politics and celebrity. It has become a treasured San Francisco staple, renowned as much for its spectacularly sculptural headgear as its content. (A San Francisco skyline hat is 14 feet high, 9 feet wide and weighs more than 250 pounds.) It has been performed for a parade of notables, from Liza Minnelli to Queen Elizabeth II.
“If ‘Seinfeld’ was about nothing, this is about everything,” Michael Janofsky wrote in The New York Times in 1998, “a wild musical homage to popular culture that has become no less a part of San Francisco than the Golden Gate Bridge, the Coit Tower and fog.”
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The show, which for years has been staged at Club Fugazi in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, was created by Steve Silver, and is constantly updated. Silver died of AIDS in 1995; Jo Schuman Silver is his widow.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.