Word: bedlam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Deitch grossly misplays Diccon, the one role which might have substance, assumedly with Kaplan's approval or instructions. Diccon is a Bedlam, a lunatic released from the asylum to beg about the country, like Poor Tom in King Lear. Deitch plays him as a controlled crafty-plotter--a fuzzy combination of Puck and an American confidence-man. His dress and manner is stylized motley rather than lunatic tatters. His elegant flourishing makes him swallow the many good jokes he has, and completely twist his character...
...plot, as much as one cares, is about the strange disappearance of Dame Gurton's sewing needle (Raye Bush is Gammer, not the needle). We eventually find it in the britches of her man Hodge (Dan Chumley), an acrobatic archetypal simpleton, but not until Diccon the Bedlam (Dan Deitch) has thrown everyone at each other's throats and chickens...
...Bedlam broke loose when the group began to march off. A rock crashed into one Negro's chest. Pop bottles and cherry bombs filled the air. Scores of whites surged off the sidewalks and waded into the column with clubs, knives and fists. When some young Negroes began hitting back, the local cops, until then languid spectators, broke it up. "We got to go back," said a shaken King afterward. "This is the meanest town in the country." The marchers did return under heavy police guard, but they also learned that Mississippi had another town to rival Philadelphia...
...over him just across the way from the Old Compton Street Cinema (current attraction: Orgy at Lil's Place). A stripper named Brigitte St. John screamed: "Billy, what do you think of my miniskirt?" and flung herself onto his car. As the reverend rode out of the bedlam, an aide was murmuring: "We're lucky to get away with our lives...
Just eleven months ago, Rocker Jordan Christopher, 25, had to stand up there and howl with the rest of the Wild Ones. But ever since he married the boss, Sybil Burton Christopher, 37, Jordan has been privileged to sit around her Manhattan bedlam, Arthur, and admire the plangent din. Last week the Wild Ones were wilder than usual as the ridiculously successful joint celebrated its first anniversary. Jordan and Sybil sliced into a birthday cake to the cheers of such music lovers as Leonard Bernstein and Disk Jockey Murray the K, who kept trying to discuss esthetics above the entertainment...