Word: casts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...narrow, smoky room, on a stage not quite wide enough for the show's five performers to buck without winging each other, the cast, backed by two pianos, lines out patter songs, monologues, ballads and production numbers (everyone onstage at once). The revue keeps up a two-beat pace with fast blackouts. Most lyrics are aimed at Manhattan's theater set and suburbia's bar-car sophisticates, but they are not necessarily too esoteric for the occasional Sixth Avenue Sindbad who "falls downstairs looking for the subway." Sample...
...Drop of a Hat (Michael Flanders and Donald Swann; Angel). An irreverent, off-key assault on an assortment of sacred cows by the two-man cast of a witty London revue. They warble their uncertain, Oxford-accented way through a series of wandering digressions on the London bus system (A Transport of Delight), the morals of the clubman (Madeira, M'Dear?), the woes of the hi-fi fan ("What do you get? Flutter on your bottom"). They do their best work, Flanders howls, in a snug little house in "an amusing mews," where...
Raintree County (MGM) begins in tedium and ends, 168 leaden minutes later, in apathy. Montgomery Clift, talking through his nose and expressing sensitivity of soul by seldom looking other cast members in the eye, jitters through the role of John Shawnessy, hero of the late Ross Lockridge Jr.'s bestselling 1948 novel. Represented to be a kind of rustic, 20-year-old Candide of pre-Civil War Indiana, 37-year-old Clift goes lurching through a swamp in search of a magical "rain tree," supposedly planted years before by Johnny Appleseed. Whether the tree bears knowledge, truth or just...
...more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades, and the film plays hearts-and-gargoyles...
...underpaid. Like many of them, he is henpecked. Unlike most of them, he wonders what happened to the old dream that leads men like him to try to set intellectual fires in the minds of junior Philistines who have no intention of getting singed. And since Purely Academic is cast as fiction, Henry also lusts after the Georgia peach whose husband is the drearily ambitious head of the economics department...