Word: clown
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Aisle (Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray; Decca, 2 sides LP). The tunes run second to the comedy in this current Broadway hit, but Lahr's wobbly voice in The Clown is worth the price of the album. Moreover, Songstress Gray can put over a song with vigor and charm; the proof is in There Never Was a Baby Like My Baby, If You Hadn't But You Did, How Will He Know...
...business in his teens as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. At 17 he enlisted in World War I, and enjoyed an unruly military career as bombardier, naval orderly and Army machine gunner. After the war he stayed on in Europe, knocking around the Continent as a variety-hall clown and soldier of fortune. The European years fed his talent for mimicry, and left him fluent in five languages and competent in three others. He was on a slow boat to Shanghai when a storm at sea diverted him to Hollywood in 1927. After three years on Broadway...
...Hollywood. Equipped with collapsible legs and an elastic face which he contorted into caricatures of exasperation, bewilderment, bliss or imbecility, he played most often the part of a tottering drunk. In Australia, where he was born, he left a Shakespearian stock company to travel with a circus as clown, acrobat and animal trainer. He came to the U.S. in 1908, rose from burlesque to become one of Ziegfeld's top comedians (Sally in 1920), later went to Hollywood, where he made scores of strenuous two-reelers...
...welcome air of informality prevails throughout. Twice the curtain opens on stage-hands. When things get dull in the last act, the clown yawns audibly. In fact nobody seems to be taking things seriously. The whole production is really a take-off on the Metropolitan Opera itself...
...curtain and peel costumes from him in onion-like layers, he gives a dizzying exhibition of that half-forgotten art, the quick change. He leaves the footlights as Captain Universe, a panicky Superman who wears an aerial on his head, slips out through the curtain again as a clown, dives back to reappear almost instantly as a cross-eyed gaucho, and then-encased in a gown which is snapped around him by a body-hugging steel spring-dodders into view as Queen Victoria...