Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Director Donn Fischer worked out the comic business for the Order of the Mystic Marauders and the song "Lovelorn," he is doubly to be commended. In any event, the whole production showed an authoritative and experienced manipulating hand. David Beer's sets, especially the simple, effective Waterfront, showed this same humorous purpose and skilled execution...
...dancing is entrusted to Robert Norriss who does a comic solo in the first act and replaces Whedon as Clyde for a ballet scene in the second. Norriss has obvious talents but they gain nothing from his fixed smile--an Amateur Hour expression and indeed the only amateurish thing about Norriss. The ballet, choreographer Dolly Niggemeyer's only misstep, is a trite, dull loss for which the dancers cannot be held responsible. Otherwise, the dancing is attractive and the stage is always lively, seldom cluttered...
Wedding Breakfast (by Theodore Reeves) treats the romances of two Jewish sisters who share a Manhattan flat. Ruth is a salesgirl engaged to a bookkeeper: the couple is patiently building toward marriage with a joint bank account, and they talk in comic clichés. Stella, the other sister (Lee Grant), has risen somewhat snootily above her background: a college graduate with a magazine job, she was engaged to a doctor who has just married someone else. She is down in the mouth when she meets the bookkeeper's bright cousin Ralph (Anthony Franciosa), who sells hardware in Buffalo...
...comparison, Ruth's story-helped by winning performances from Virginia Vincent and Harvey Lembeck-is entertaining, though at an inch-above-comic-strip level. It suggests that when Playwright Reeves abandons pretenses and writes to please in a straight popular-comedy vein, he may very well prove pleasing...
Another important guest belonged to Comic Steve Allen, who had a televised talk with his boss, glib NBC President Sylvester (Pat) Weaver. Said Weaver, defending the network's heavily publicized "spectaculars" (color TV extravaganzas): "I have never met anybody who saw-that is to say, any just plain person as against a critic or somebody that is looking at it with a special frame of reference, usually his own witticisms-that saw these shows in color with the limited number of sets available, who just didn't flip his lid, as we say at the high executive level...