Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Charge Here? contains altogether 159 of the delicate lunacies, the scenes of bizarre domestic confusion exquisitely rendered with a crow quill pen which have made The New Yorker's George Price one of the most popular of U.S. comic artists. One industrious hobby ist is shown completing a parlor-sized steam engine right in the parlor it is sized to fit. His wife wanly observes: "Some times I even wish he'd get interested in another woman." Another character, the father of a crowded and bewildered family, is at last able to explain to them the curio which...
Girl Crazy (M.G.M.) shows Judy Garland all buoyed up by Mickey Rooney. There are also Tommy Dorsey's band, which sets the pace for some stupefying dance routines, a comic girl (Nancy Walker) who talks like a Brooklyn Dodger in skirts, and a musicomic plot...
What gives this highly unremarkable tale its remarkable lift is no less its fidelity to life than its sense of fun. Though its comic edge is keen, Sally's and Bill's unconventional housekeeping is rich in bedspread and double-boiler touches that evoke delighted recognitions. And though lightly handled, Sally and Bill are pretty convincing people. Much of the comedy comes out of the piquant conflict of their own temperaments-out of Sally's young need to be dramatic and Bill's grown-up insistence on being downright. Their easy, sprightly, sometimes funny talk stays...
...involves something including Carmen Miranda, sabotage, stolen records, and the Articles of War. The play was made amusing and worthwhile by the double-talking sergeant reading the articles of war ("Article I--Flibbergabbit on the scrannifornia with homerjohnny fidledudeed on government satchelfradd--the penalty is death!"), and an excellent comic as the supposed saboteur who becomes the recipient of a kiss from a hairy-chested Carmen Miranda...
...highlight of the evening for me was Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton's coda on "Black and Tan Fantasy." Nanton's plunger trombone, although sometimes exploited for comic effect, is my favorite voice in the Ellington band--especially so since Johnny Hodges has taken to playing only sentimentally, with every appearance as soloist winding up in an ever-softening fadeout. "Rockin' In Rhythm," as always, was a good, solid performance, and even Nance's fiddle couldn't mar the beauty of "Moon Mist...