Word: beggarly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from deafening. Well heralded Holiday hit the newsstands with a thud, and at 50? a copy most people just let it lie. It was hard to tell the stories from the ads, and the editors themselves hadn't decided whether they were describing a Roman holiday or a beggar...
Died. General Phya Phahon Phon Phayuhasena, 60, moonfaced, swashbuckling onetime strong man of Siam, leader of the 1933 coup d'etat which eventually resulted in the abdication of the late King Prajadhipok, for five years premier and dictator, briefly in 1941 a yellow-robed, Buddhist beggar-monk; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Bangkok...
What it has parted with least wisely, for it has found nothing at all compensating, is most of the hardboiled, high-flying satire of The Beggar's Opera. Gay ripped open the underworld of his time to reveal its dissoluteness and dog-eat-dog love of lucre; but he had a corrupt great world equally in mind, even satirizing Prime Minister Robert Walpole. And Gay made his bawds and fences, his cutpurses and stool pigeons part of a pungent, roaring scene...
...Beggar's Holiday has a full crew of mobsters, doublecrossers and madams; it skips from brothels to hobo jungles to clinks; but it lacks satiric or any other kind of momentum. It skitters between monkeyshines and melodrama, dilutes the satire, overdoes the sex. But it remains, by Broadway standards, refreshingly unconventional. While giving little to Beggar's Holiday, The Beggar's Opera perhaps took something vital away-the chance to start from scratch, to build homogeneously from the ground...
Even in pure musicomedy terms, Beggar's Holiday has as many ups & downs as an elevator. But when it forgets that John Gay ever lived, and the mixed white and Negro cast sings and stomps to Duke Ellington's rhythmic tunes, Beggar's Holiday has real high spirits and character...