Word: fadiman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...dispense this capsule advice, Producer Irving Mansfield (Talent Scouts') engaged Critic Clifton Fadiman as moderator, and Comic Abe Burrows and Playwright-Director George S. Kaufman (The Man Who Came to Dinner, You Can't Take It With You) for permanent panel members. Right from the start it became embarrassingly clear that the problems of most entertainers could be solved more readily with a grain of aspirin than with a pound of prosy counsel. On the opening show, Bandleader Artie Shaw departed from his script to remark: "My problem is that I haven't any problem...
...reviews and audience apathy caused This Is Broadway to switch from being a Lonely Hearts clinic to a variety show, spiced with Fadiman's pontifical urbanity, Burrows' gags, and the astringent flavoring of Kaufman's strong dislikes (nightclubs, classical music, opera). The panel still listened to problems, but with more than half an ear for contrived comedy. (A soprano complains that her father won't let her go to Dallas without a chaperone. Fadiman: "Doesn't your father trust you?" Soprano:. "Yes, but he doesn't trust anyone else...
With well-paced acts, some high-level ad-lib talk and a genial approach, This Is Broadway last week was one of the first of the summer TV sustaining shows to nab a fall sponsor-AVCO's Crosley Division (radios & TV sets). Though gratified by the windfall, Fadiman (who had been against the serious approach from the beginning) had urged all along that Broadway be changed from an hour-long show to its present 30 minutes. "One thing about this show," he once mused, "it's delightfully improvable...
Punchy Prose. Clifton (Information Please) Fadiman thought that an impressive-and depressing-fact about the past 25 years was the decline in reader "attention." Readers refused to read anything except "the shortened paragraph, the carefully measured column, the 'punchy' sentence." The whole thing had reached its climax, he thought, in the new Cowles-published Quick-"a news digest of news digests." Wrote he: "One can easily imagine a digest of Quick (Quicker) and finally one of Quicker (Quickest). From Quickest to the nonreading of the news seems a logical next step...
This Is Broadway (Wed. 9:30 p.m., CBS). Clifton Fadiman, George S. Kaufman and Abe Burrows counseling stage-struck performers...