Word: gongs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Greater New York were out in force to welcome Liberace to Madison Square Garden. While boxing fans withdrew trembling to the shelter of their favorite saloons, a near-capacity crowd of 15,000 jammed the Garden; about 80% were women.* With a roll of drums, the crash of a gong, and a harp glissando, Liberace bounced onto the stage, wearing a snowy-white dress suit (later he changed into a gold lamé jacket...
...eventually his moment comes. An assistant director with a voice like a backfield coach bawls: "Keep it quiet now, boys. Quiet. Quiet, if you please!" A gong bangs with doomlike clangor. A horrid silence falls. "Speed," mutters the man in the bucket seat of the huge Mitchell camera, peering through its eyepieces as if appalled. Then, while the 50 hairy ones look on in a sort of belligerent despair, while the tourists stand on tiptoes, while the director and servitors of the camera lean close enough to breathe on him, the actor kneels beside a chaise longue in the awful...
...Skip the Gong. Over the past 20 years Director Marx and Associate Wanda Ellis have listened to more than 400,000 such hopefuls. Each week Wanda Ellis weeds out the worst of the contestants, and then Marx and Producer Lou Goldberg join her to pick from the survivors six acts to compete with the winner of the previous show. All worked for the famed Major Edward Bowes until his death in 1946. They formed a partnership with Bowes's lawyer and Ted Mack, the current master of ceremonies, to create the TV version of the show, which has been...
...Mack has carried on the major's tradition of putting an end to applause by repeating "All right, all right, all right ..." But he was too softhearted to continue the major's gong-banging when a contestant lost the audience's favor. Mack conducts rambling interviews with the amateurs, cracks heavy-handed jokes, generally contributes to the cornball atmosphere that satisfies both sponsor Pet Milk and the largely rural and small-town audience that stays tenaciously faithful to the show...
...policy which attracted considerable interest in its productions. Among the foreign writers to whom HDC gave first American productions were Maeterlinck, Guitry, Galsworthy, Cocteau, and A. A. Milne. The club also went out of its way to produce unusual native plays like John Dos Passos' The Moon is a Gong in 1925 and Auden and Isherwood's Dog Beneath the Skin in 1936. During this time the HDC had no theater to work with, moving its productions all over the area from Sanders and Brattle Hall to Worcester's Horticultural Hall and the Boston Academy of Music. But perhaps...