Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COMEDY IN MUSIC. That matchless mirthmaster of the keyboard, Victor Borge, riffles through gags and slides off the piano bench without altering his usual mask of dismay and disdain. Added notes, comic and musical, are provided by Straight Man Leonid Hambro...
...performers who bask in O'Brian's favor -Bert Lahr, Perry Como and Walter Cronkite, to name most of them-are vastly outnumbered by those who do not. O'Brian has excoriated Danny Kaye for 15 years on the grounds that Kaye's comic talent never escaped infancy. He is equally steadfast in his disapproval of Ed Sullivan ("Old Smiley"), David Susskind ("Little David"), CBS News Commentator Mike Wallace ("a vacuum") and scores of other performers who fall short of the O'Brian standards. "I'm not a Hessian soldier," says O'Brian...
Actually, much of the Chelsea look is a revival of oldtime fashion ideas from older, more fashionable times. Nostalgia is the order of the day. Edwardian sleeves and bertha collars, ribbons, roses and trailing black velvet are the tricks of the trade. It is their high comic sense, however, that affords the Chelsea group the authority to unearth shades of the past, drop a street-dress hemline down to the ankles, cut a cocktail suit from a Victorian lace tablecloth...
...provoke laughter. Immeasurable credit is due Director Mike Nichols for keeping the pace on the wing and inventing cleverly apposite bits of business. One dry jump and three wet ones are taken off the bridge, all with acrobatic finesse. The performances of Wallach, Jackson, and Arkin are models of comic acting, perfect in control and timing, flawless in witty inflection of the lines...
...comic scenes are played a bit too slickly, too much on the surface of the characters. Harvard audiences tend to watch the performance more than the person, and the actors are all too conscious of this. They get isolated laughs with the delivery of individual lines, instead of letting their humorousness emerge slowly. In a comedy of characters, rather than one of wit, this can be fatal. Darryl Palmer's Medvedenko, for example, never becomes more than a caricatured schoolteacher: we never feel his pain...