Word: choruses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...waif, got her to weep in the sad scenes by whispering, "Darling, your dog has just been run over." When Dainty June was four, Mother whipped up a vaudeville song-and-dance for her, gave a lesser role to sister Rose Louise (who later became Gypsy Rose), added a chorus of little boys, who often "had very little talent because Mother didn't expect to pay them." The act packed 'em in across Pantages' corn-fed circuit. "God is watching over our little act," Mother reassured everyone. "He won't knock vaudeville out from under...
...went down together with vaudeville, pursued by child-welfare officers and cops hunting for the bales of towels Mother filched from hotels. To escape, Baby June eloped when she was 13 with one of the chorus boys, aged 18, outran Mama in a breathless chase to the honeymoon train. Big Sister Gypsy was booked by Mama in a Kansas City burlesque house, soon struck a jackpot at Minsky's in Manhattan and put up Mama in velvety splendor in a flat above the honky-tonks of 42nd Street...
...beds down in fleabag hotels, gobbles chow mein breakfasts, and endlessly reprises corny routines and lyrics straight from Mama's potboiling hand. Ordeal by stage mother drives gentle would-be husband No. 4 (Jack Klugman) to the suitcase-packing point of no return, and June elopes with a chorus boy. And just when Mama Rose's star-making dream seems footlight-years away, the Big Break comes for Gypsy-Louise in a Kansas burlesque house, where she begins by taking off Mama's apron strings...
...Between each number the theatre is blackened and the performers take their positions for the next of the songs--some interpreted as still pictures, others with lively action. In the "complaint category," for example, "Talking Union" and "Union Maid" are done with audience participation, including community singing on the chorus of the latter. The cast distributes union handbills reading "Oust Boss Gunch" and "If yer gonna split Atoms you can't split Ranks." (Jones had the handbills printed from old union woodcuts he found in the Princeton archives...
Certainly, Stendahl had no intention of showing Julien exciting this mortal coil to the unconstrained accompaniment of a chorus of screeching voices, dominated by vibrating sopranos who soar higher and higher. Again, Stendahl had no intention of letting the weather conspire with the gods on the day of Julien's execution to show cloudiness and blue, the spacious firmament. Sorel strode to his death all right, but not to the majestic rumble of five symphonies' worth of kettle drums...