Word: douglass
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most important contribution of the Negro to American intellectual history has been to the meaning of democracy. Perhaps the best relevant definition was posed by a question asked by Frederick Douglass in 1889. He inquired in the African Methodist Episcopal Review whether "American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity could be made to include and protect alike and forever all American citizens the rights which have been guaranteed to them by the organic and fundamental laws of the land...
...SUNKEN GARDEN, by Douglass Wallop (254 pp.; Norton; $3.50), spins this sudsy question in the novelistic washer: Will the seven-year itch spoil the successful marriage of Tom Forester, boy adman? Author Wallop is noted for his 1954 crystal-gazing novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (later the hit musical Damn Yankees), in which he showed how the Devil, with an assist from a Washington Senator outfielder, could raise hob in a baseball stadium; now he shows how the devil in the flesh complicates family life in the Madison Avenue...
Damn Yankees (book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop; music & lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross) involves most of the team that turned out The Pajama Game. This time baseball is their target, and with pretty nearly as happy results. Under George Abbott's direction, there is a constant sense of zip, an occasional effect of explosion. There is plainly a belief that all music aspires toward a brass band's exuberance, all locomotion toward a fire engine's clanging speed. And there is a very proper belief that one Gwen Verdon is the equal...
...Walston is a first-rate Devil. Disdaining pitchfork theatrics, he is a provokingly cool customer even when buying souls, with a tart, casual manner and a fine, stylish unwholesomeness. As Joe Hardy. Stephen Douglass does all that is required of him - bats .524 for the Senators, sings very well for the show. Richard Adler-Jerry Ross songs and Bob Fosse's dances have hardly more than the outdoor virtues, but they have the right rousingness and tingle. And William and Jean Eckart's sets are amusing and crisp...
Even Miss Verdon's calculating gyrations don't put her way out in front of the rest of the east. As befits a baseball musical, Damn Yankees is a team effort. Stephen Douglass as the young players, Robert Shafter as the cocoon from which Douglass emerges, and Shannon Bolin as a baseball widow all have acting as well as singing talent. When Douglass sings "A Man Doesn't Know" or Shafter sings "Goodbye, Old Girl" the show takes on a melodious wistfulness surprising, and welcome, in an evening so high-spirited...