Word: comically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...animated rag doll bounded onto the television screen, ogled the camera lens, wagged a pair of aileron ears at the audience and wrapped his rubber legs around the lilt of a song. Ray Bolger, the greatest U.S. comic dancer and a veteran of 30 years in show business, was back at work in TV-and just in time to inject some merriment into TV's procession of tired clowns. In a $1,500,000 musical potpourri called Washington Square, a sentimental paean to Manhattan's self-consciously picturesque Greenwich Village, Hoofer Bolger is making his second attempt...
Washington Square (14 alternate Sundays, 4 p.m., E.S.T., NBC) casts Bolger as friend or nursemaid to such village regulars as Comedienne Elaine Stritch, Singer Kay Armen, Comic Arnold Stang, and such one-shot shimmers from uptown as Martha Raye, Abbott & Costello. The première was overplotted and a little cluttered ("It was all we could do to find who belonged in the Square and who didn't," Bolger confessed). But with less emphasis on a running story-which tripped Bolger in his filmed TV efforts-and more on the infectious didos of its star, the show...
...appeal-he is trampled on but triumphant. At 52 he is still as nimble as he was back in 1936 when Broadway gave him stardom, for his part in George Balanchine's difficult Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet, in On Your Toes. Eventually he emerged as a character comic who could also deliver a wistful lyric. By Where's Charley?, he was translating most of life into impish leaps and droll gesture. "In show business," says Bolger, "whatever one can do with one's body is infinitely better than what one can do with words...
...usual, the chorus dominates the production and, in this case, typifies its vigor and beautiful clumsiness. The fairies, while retaining their mock grace throughout, have enough individuality of feature to be genuinely comic, rather than a mere weary shuffling crowd. And the Peers manage to retain their stiff upper lips almost all the time, but fortunately not quite all the time. (Besides, they manage some very nice harmonies.) Richard Grand, the stage director, keeps them moving just enough to keep things lightsome...
...Geordie. The stiffest comic punch the British have delivered since High and Dry-an intoxicating mixture of Scotch and wry; with Bill Travers, Alastair Sim (TIME...