Word: folkish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Robert Skinner and Lorna Kreuger) have a good deal to do with this; the backdrops for successive scenes are frankly mounted on a large picture frame, and the effect is never more Brechtian than when substantial sections look as if they were made out of old packing-crates. The folkish songs composed (or, sometimes, borrowed) by Caldwell Titcomb, and sung mostly by Johanna Linch, are also highly atmospheric. These are the familiar devices of Brecht's "Epic Theatre" staging, but it seems to me that in this production they are fused in a new way with the words...
...good deal that needs to be swept. The small human story with the wise human moral that Sidney Howard, in They Knew What They Wanted, neatly packed into one room has been wildly scattered and in places quite submerged all over the Napa Valley countryside. For all that is folkish in Fella, something plaintively simple is missing; as there is sentiment and to spare but no pervasive current of emotion. For in excess of any proper musical's quota, Fella has been choked up, and in places even hoked up with rustic razzle-dazzle and vineyard partygoing. All this...
...lick all the bad ones, the farm boy who can drink city slickers under the table. With everything soundly proceeding at a comic-strip level, No Time for Sergeants becomes a fine, boisterous exercise in sustained improbability, in morning-fresh outrageousness. It has a kind of healthy, folkish madness: it makes the Air Force seem like something personally invented rather than anything ever experienced or observed; it makes sex-on the rare occasions it refers to it-seem rather like a good breakfast food. As Will, Andy Griffith has enormous lumpish charm; Roddy McDowall is just the right foil...
Odets has given the play no basic style: neither the vivid folkishness that The Green Pastures brought to the Bible nor the Main Street flavor The Golden Apple gave to Homer. The Flowering Peach is sometimes gently philosophic, sometimes folkish. sometimes straight domestic comedy, and at its broadest, borscht-belt farce. What it displays is a meandering fancy rather than a fused vision...
Hayride is one of the weirdest things that ever opened a Broadway season, as well as one of the worst. A long, noisy evening of hillbilly music and song, it would lack charm even if it were authentically folkish. Actually, it seems about one part Texas to four parts television...