Pee-Wee returns

From the LA Times' David Ng in the C-J...

The red bow tie. The form-fitting gray suit. The white loafers. Oh, and that laugh. Pee-wee Herman is back, and his creator, Paul Reubens, is overjoyed — and more than a little bit nervous too.

“I've put part of him away for a long time, but part of him has always been here with me,” the soft-spoken actor said in an interview from his home in L.A. “I think it will be like riding a bike — which is not a bad analogy for Pee-wee, by the way.”

But he added: “I have some fear that he won't be funny after all this time. I don't want to ruin it.”

After a hiatus of close to 20 years, Reubens announced Monday that he would be playing Pee-wee in a new stage show at the Music Box @ Fonda in Hollywood. “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” set to run Nov. 19-29, is a re-imagined version of the actor's original theatrical show of the same name that began at the Groundlings Theatre in 1981....

The show will feature the same story line as the original: Pee-wee, a nerdy man-child with a colorful menagerie of anthropomorphic friends, is granted a wish to learn to fly but gives the wish away, much to his eventual regret...

In one notable change, a character played on stage by the late comedian Phil Hartman has been replaced with another character. “I didn't want to be looking at someone else playing Phil's part,” Reubens said....

Weird. I didn't know Hartman had been a part of his CBS show!

Since the heyday of the Pee-wee franchise, Reubens' career has been a roller-coaster ride of legal fiascoes and tentative attempts at a comeback. In 1991, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure after he was arrested in Florida in an adult movie theater. In 2002, he was charged with possessing child pornography because of images in his art collection; he ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor obscenity charge in 2004 in exchange for a lighter sentence....

The actor has spent the last 10 years mostly in guest-star roles on television, like his recent stint on NBC's “30 Rock” as a buffoonish member of a royal European family. He has also acted in a handful of prestigious indie films, including “Blow” and the upcoming “Life During Wartime” and “Nailed.”...