Word: comical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...show's biggest asset is pint-sized Nancy Walker (Best Foot Forward, On the Town), who, as class-conscious Yetta Samovar, shows all her likable toughness, sharp timing and comic verve. But Nancy Walker's biggest asset is her way with a good brassy ballad, which she chants in a good brassy way, and Barefoot Boy allots her exactly...
...there by giving Philadelphians what they seemed to want: all the news (no matter how trivial), sold in good time and told in good taste. Lest his Bulletin track mud into the neat row houses where it was a daily guest, he forbade it to muckrake. When the syndicated comic-strippers took to stripping their girls, he had his art room paint their clothes right back...
...Back to Methuselah, as a play, is the first part, a beautiful Shavian comedy of the Garden of Eden. The second part is second-rate drawing-room Shaw, and most of the rest is cerebral claptrap in settings of 2170 A.D., 3000 A.D. and 31,920 A.D. If the comic spirit were not alive in these scenes they would almost fall into the class of Wellsian monstrosity...
...Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) is a triumph of comic virtuosity. To avoid offense to Pansy's prototype (the big-city Yiddish tenement dweller), Allen confines himself to kidding Yiddish-English. He seems endlessly aware of new and whimsical wrinkles in the dialect. "When I am a young goil, footloose and fancy," Pansy once related, "I am woiking, a waitress, in Doberman's delicatessen. Is coming every day for lunch a liverwurst salesman. He is a goodtime Irving, a fancy dandy, also floiting a bissel. The liverwurst salesman is to the other waitress, Supreme Feitelbaum, engaged. With ogling, also...
...same for saints & sinners might have helped his play if it weren't so generally past helping. It is partly a mess because it hasn't a shred of self-respect. It trifles shamelessly with its material, trying to be dramatic one moment and comic the next. Worse still, it purveys some of its sex for leers...