Word: beget
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Hallelujah, Baby! Broadway frequently believes that it is more blessed to borrow than to beget, which is why so many musicals seem like retrospective shows of previous shows. Hallelujah, Baby! takes the standard saga of a showbiz Cinderella who wants a Shubert Alley marquee for her tiara and combines it with an up-from-wage-slavery plot dating from the social-protest '30s. The only novelty is that the protagonists are Negroes. While it affects to be a six-decade panorama of Negro advancement, the show is more like a petrified forest of liberal and sentimental clich...
...gradual change in nearly 11 of man's ways of looking at life, at war, at himself. Poverty and racial rejudice are obviously powerful incitements to violence, but so, he says, is the lassie American emphasis on getting head. The individualism and selfishness inherent in an acquisitive society beget a climate of violence, as does hypernationalism. A Sign for Cain will give readers a healthy dose of "the dignity of indignation," but it does not offer much hope that man will take the cure...
...ding-dong farce, calling on a corps of hard-sell comedians to transform the townfolk into strident cartoons. Jonathan Winters as an addled police officer, Ben Blue as an irrelevant drunk, and Paul Ford as a sword-swinging Legionnaire are the chief offenders, since their familiar broad comedy bits beget feeble satire of Birchite fear and hysteria. This seasonable breach of security is well worth the risks, though, and an obligatory nod to young love turns out surprisingly well, mostly because John Phillip Law, as a tense Russian sailor, and blonde Movie Newcomer Andrea Dromm, as an amiable babysitter, make...
Five or six years pass. Cats beget kittens, frauleins beget G.I. issue from the Army of Occupation, bad jokes beget worse ones, and Producer-Director Gottfried Reinhardt (whose wife, Silvia, perpetrated the scenario) underscores the ironies by barreling in beer-hall background music. Actor Redford, a winner on Broadway (Barefoot in the Park), overworks his smooth, stagy comedy style to diminishing effect. Working even harder, Actor Connors curiously resembles those lacquered leading men who proliferated in Hollywood during the '40s while everyone else was away...
While there, she gets just mad enough to cry. The episode might be more affecting if Ruth Gordon had not made Mrs. Lord just as odious as her Goneril-and-Regan duo of daughters. As every contemporary playgoer knows, the family is an heir-conditioning unit: bitches beget bitches. The denouement is embarrassing, as Mrs. Lord marries one of those beamish Balkan boys with a rich grandmother fixation...