Word: farrago
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Drop of a Hat. Ranging between satire and whimsy, the educated "afterdinner farrago" of two English song-and-chatter specialists provides one of the gayest evenings on Broadway...
...Drop of a Hat is the two-man "afterdinner farrago" that ran in London for 759 performances. The two men are Michael Flanders, who is vivacious and bearded and sails about in a wheelchair, and Donald Swann, who is mousy and bespectacled and stays put at the piano. Flanders wrote the words for the songs they sing, Swann the music. Flanders also does the talking between songs, which is now and then at Swann's expense. The two of them are notably British yet notably themselves-casual and informal, yet with the timing of the solar system...
Edwin Booth (by Milton Geiger) is José Ferrer, and never the twain connect. This farrago of many scenes is nothing resembling a play; this thespian in many costumes evokes no once-great actor. Something has been borrowed from the legend of the Mad Booths, and something from the lives, to which have been added puns, pomposities, and speeches from Shakespeare's plays. In an atmosphere of swig-and-spout, Old Junius and Young Ned part company in California; Ned, amid rehearsals, finds romance with Mary Devlin; John Wilkes Booth shouts his Latin and is the assassin...
...still showed plenty of bombast. In an interview with U.S. newsmen, dyspeptic Havana Rebel Chieftain Dr. Faustino Pérez alibied the "minor setback" in the capital as caused mostly by "delayed public reaction," insisted: "Our units are intact." Broadcasting from the clandestine rebel station, Castro unleashed a farrago of nonsensical victory claims, e.g., "There is no rebel patrol that has not scored a resounding success." He added an unlikely atrocity tale: "In the Sierra Maestra peasants' huts are being bombed with napalm that came from the United States...
...Tufts cast deserves real credit for its performance. Uncoordinated until now, it clicks crisply; and the machinery of America, moving slowly at first, warms and speeds up as the play progresses. The play's farrago of dramatic styles, songs, dances and persons is difficult to harmonize, but the loosely knit structure of the play is bound into a tightly cohesive knot, creating a final fluidity. Leads and choruses maintain the spritely and varying rhythms of American life throughout. The same persons flying-shuttled in and out of different roles, weaving the loom of America. Robert Dargie as Uncle...