Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that stood on its hind legs like a bird and hopped like a frog. The kangaroo was real, nevertheless, and also real (probably or possibly) are other strange animals that have been seen only rarely by civilized man. This is the conviction of French-born Bernard Heuvelmans, and his book, On the Track of Unknown Animals (Hill & Wang; $6.95), makes fine reading for people who like to hear that new things can still be found without a spaceship...
There is no more potent musicomedy fuel on Broadway than Ethel Merman, and she powers Gypsy with 50 million lbs. of personality thrust. But the show merely quivers on the launching pad. Its book is drab and uninventive; its songs are also-rans, though the trumpet-tonsiled Merman voice is always in the winner's circle. Jerome Robbins' dance spoofs are designed to show how funny-awful vaudeville was, and by sheer glut and garishness turn pretty gaudy-awful themselves. A Mermanly try at playing up Mama's spunk and jollifying her sadism fails when the script...
...Gypsy (book by Arthur Laurents; music by Jule Styne; direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins) opened to breathless rave reviews. Burbled the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "Best damn musical I've seen in years." Said Brooks Atkinson of the Times: "Most satisfactory musical of the season." The critical fan-farenade for what is, at best, a so-so show would be a puzzler if the answer was not blazoned on the marquee. The answer: Ethel Merman. They all love Ethel, but the love is sorely tested in her latest role as the most monstrous stage mother ever...
...reader who picks up a book on, say, unidentified flying objects, knows that he is not going to be told, on the first page, that flying saucers are imaginary. The author has an advance from his publisher, and he is going to see the thing through, complete with wiring diagrams and interviews with little green men. The case of the beatniks is similar; the unwashed T shirts are tangible enough, but is there anything new, socio-religio-artistically speaking, inside them? The author of this Baedeker to Beatland says, naturally, that there is. The barbarians, he reports, are within...
Much of the book uses reality merely as a springboard toward fantasy; characters may suddenly levitate or turn into werewolves. Also, there are boggy tracts that sound, and no doubt are meant to sound, like ads for Rosicrucianism ("large increments of love are released that are fermenting in the Fertile Void"). What emerges is an allegory on whatever the reader chooses-the perversity of man, the bright illusion of love, the red-eyed aurochs of war. Dotted throughout the book are moon-mad digressions-a plan to enroll farm boys in the Joy Scouts of America, hike them into Harlem...