Word: drumming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...months, Bernard Rich was car ried onstage by the seat of his pants to play drums in his parents' vaudeville act. At six, sporting a sailor suit and Lord Fauntleroy curls, he played the Tivoli theater circuit as "Traps, the Drum Wonder." At seven, he toured Australia for $1,000 a week, and at eleven conducted his own band. Now a greying 49, Buddy Rich is still the Drum Wonder, still hanging on by the seat of his pants...
...inadequate; his mosquito-like dartings back and forth across the stage grow quite irritating after a while. When he plays to his mistress, Marie, he looks and acts like a little boy; with the Doctor, he seems completely unconcerned to be the victim of a deranged experimenter; with the Drum Major (when he ought to be dead drunk, incidentally, and not stone sober) his "Let's be friends" sounds like Mickey Mouse addressing Black Pete. Quite apart from the debate as to whether Woyzeck should be a clod destroyed by a wicked society or a sensitive young man destroyed...
Robert Edgar is badly miscast as the Captain, who clearly should be fat, stupid, and cruel, not thin as a rail, witty, and effeminate. He does what he does well, but it isn't what he should do. Roger Zim looks the part of the Drum Major who woos Marie, and he has a marvelously deep voice, but his braggadocio is too much a conscious parody of Anthony Quinn or the Marlboro Man; it draws laughs for that reason, but it is not right...
...Dirksen has the ability to deliver the kind of bipartisan support that Johnson himself gave President Eisenhower, or to with-hold it -- as he did over the new civil rights bill. With vital legislation teetering between passage and defeat, Dirksen could tip the vote against bills in order to drum up bargaining power for his prayer amendment. And if the Republicans make the expected off-year gains this November in the Senate, the minority leader's leverage will increase...
Peter Weil as the Drum Major and Carl Nagin as Woyzeck's friend Andres work in their parts more out of physical presence than anything else. Mayer has, on occasion, underdirected his actors: Nagin seems to be playing more to himself than to Babe, and James Shuman's monologue sounds more like an exercise in dialogue modulation than the barroom philosophy it should...