Word: beggaring
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...decided to take Italian opera for a ride. He picked his tunes from the songs the butchers & bakers sang, strung them on a lowbrow plot about London cops, gangsters and bums, made his tattered characters ape the flouncy foibles of London's diamond horseshoe. His musical show, The Beggar's Opera, became London's biggest...
...centuries passed, the classically prim Italian operas were forgotten, but the frowsy Beggar's Opera became a classic. Last week the Beggar's Opera even made the 20th-century radio, when a company under Conductor Josef Honti gave it a first broadcast over NBC's Red network. John Gay's ribald lines had been studio-broken, but there were still some 18th-Century cracks which strained the broadcasting code ("Yes, indeed, the Sex is frail. But the first time a woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time...
...that Kaufman's record is devoid of flops. Of 34 productions, eleven lost money, five others would have, except for movie sales. But a record which includes Dulcy, Merton of the Movies, Beggar on Horseback, The Butter and Egg Man, The Royal Family, June Moon, Once in a Lifetime, Of Thee I Sing, Dinner at Eight, You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner implies as great a knowledge of what the public will laugh at as of how to keep it laughing. Kaufman beat all his rivals at comedy and satire...
Teamwork. Probably this lack of passionate convictions has helped make Kaufman the ideal collaborator. His adaptable, accommodating mind is geared to avoid collisions. It is also geared to let the other fellow's personality, rather than Kaufman's, permeate the play. What colors Beggar on Horseback, for example, is the pleasantly housebroken imaginativeness of Marc Connelly; what colors The Royal Family is the romantic bustle of Edna Ferber. The plays Kaufman has written with Moss Hart are better fused because, as comic playwrights, the two men are cut to much the same pattern...
...when he returned to England shortly after was estimated at $6,000,000, one of the largest in the country. His wife's jewels were valued at $100,000 "at the very least." One Indian prince granted Clive $150,000 a year. Said witty Horace Walpole: "If a beggar asks charity, he says: 'Friend, I have no small brilliants about me.'" The cost of living, Walpole added, rose immediately when Clive returned. Not everybody was amused. Investigated by Parliament, Clive defended his greed: "Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation! . . . an opulent...