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John Cheever lamented that he sounded like a moldy fig, and Ernest Hemingway was disappointed “because his voice was a light tenor,” Ms. Mantell said, “and didn’t jibe at all with the rough, raucous, macho image he wanted to project.”

Together, they tear the moldy fig leaf off a Hollywood staple, the Arthurian-style romance — with its chivalric code, knightly virtues and courtly manners — to reveal a mercenary, transactional world of men, women and power.

He had a particular love for old-school New Orleans jazz, which, in accordance with the Moldy Fig philosophy of the nineteen-forties and fifties, he held to be superior to later varieties.

The axe-wielding fantasy has endured because it’s funny and a good story, but it also makes Seeger seem like a moldy fig, the haggard dad screaming, “Turn it down!”—while in reality he was anything but.

One shows a familiar face: that of the usher himself, the playwright-director-actor Rome Neal, currently playing Thelonious Monk in a one-man show at the Moldy Fig, a jazz club a few blocks away.