Granted, Roger Catlin's Sunday Washington Post Arts & Style piece about TV actors performing Shakespeare is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but writers about popular culture should not make a mistake like this one:
Too bad Robert Reed isn’t around to join Florence Henderson for a turn, by the Brady Brunch couple, in “Macbeth.” Even without him, though, Henderson could take charge of the central story as Lady Macbeth, egging her man on to his deed, in the way she did as Lady Brady, conflating “Miiike!” and“Maaac!” in the process.
Along these lines, how about Eve Plumb, from that same beloved sitcom, bringing her Jan Bradyness on the road in a touring company of “The Tempest” where, when attention always seems to turn to Prospero’s daughter, as it once did to her TV sister Marcia, she can exclaim with her pained frustration, “Miranda, Miranda, Miranda!”I'll forgive Catlin for apparently forgetting that Robert Reed was a Shakespearean-trained actor who was constantly complaining to Sherwood Schwartz and the show runners about the mediocre quality of the scripts he was given, but to forget that the title of the iconic Friday-night staple of the early 1970s was "The Brady Bunch," not "The Brady Brunch," begs for less leniency.
Of course, maybe the reference to "brunch" is a Freudian slip about Robert Reed's being gay.
