Catherine O’Hara, A Writer’s Dream

With her, none of the greatness came from what was on the page

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

In Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy’s lovely and affectionate comedy about an amateur theater troupe, there’s a moment where the local musical theater king and queen — a married couple, they own the local travel agency — are auditioning for the big community musical. They’re played by the late Fred Willard and now, unfathomably, the late Catherine O’Hara, and the audition is pitch-perfect terrible. It’s a wonderful movie — all of Christopher Guest’s movies, well, as a writer, I like to say they’re movies directed by Christopher Guest but written by Guest and Eugene Levy, you know, the script’s important.

But okay. Back to the audition scene.

It’s the two of them — Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara, and they’re like bad high school actors all grown up — and the audition piece they’re doing is an original and unforgettable version of Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis — and look, I have seen this moment a zillion times — it’s in snippets all over the place, I’ve seen it in the theater, I’ve seen it on Instagram and TikTok, and I’ve seen it, unfortunately, a lot since last week when the news broke that Catherine O’Hara had died — but it was only a little while ago that I noticed that during the audition scene, whenever Fred Willard has a line, Catherine O’Hara almost imperceptibly mouths the line along with him.

It’s something, again, you sometimes see in really bad school plays. The players have memorized the whole thing so completely and robotically that they’ll just mouth along with the other people on stage. O’Hara does it, and it’s wonderful, but you might, like me, miss it the first couple of times you see the movie.