Word: hackett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Peter (Dick Shawn) and Pat (Joan Hackett) enter marriage with eight-ninths of a child, one-tenth of an income, and 999/1,000 of a conviction on Pat's part that she has enough love for the three of them. The infant is not seen but heard, and the squally Eine kleine Nachtmusik rasps on Peter's and Pat's sleep-starved nerves with the first intimation that they are somewhere east of Eden...
Dick Shawn and Joan Hackett are admirable foils. He paints the clown-husband character with broad vaudevillian brush strokes. She is a comic pointilliste, and her precise inflections of wifeliness dot the brain like a quiver of hatpins. Peterpat sometimes gets enveloped in the vapors of farce, but one deep breath of comic wisdom animates it-marriage is as funny as hell...
...Ball is a misaddressed musical mailbag. Buddy Hackett, a droll fellow of manic and mournful mien, should be readdressed to oldtime burlesque, where his earthy urbanisms could blue the air like cigar smoke. The frenetically agitated dances should be restored to the speeded-up silent film. The nondescript music should be sent back to recompose itself. The book has never left its natural state-pulp...
...inanimate star of the evening is Sam, a crystal ball that tells the future incorrectly. Hackett, a Coney Island sharper turned pseudo-Freudian mind-sweeper, has great faith in Sam ("it comes from Bombay, the farfetched East"). Under Hackett's lunatic gaze, Sam's face turns red, as well it might, since in Act I the crystal ball mismatches two pairs of lovers: an arm-twisting loan shark (Steve Roland) with a taffy-sweet Ferris-wheel operator (Karen Morrow), and a glib but honest-hearted Coney barker (Richard Kiley) with a roundheeled golddigger (Luba Lisa...
Since plot is nought, Ball relies on Buddy Hackett for a nightlong transfusion of comic relief. He can fire a salvo of laughter with the whites of his eyes, and step on a dud line so that it explodes, but he has to work so hard to be playful that it kills the fun. Apart from Hackett, only Luba Lisa comes out of this Coney Island carnage with talent and personality arrestingly intact. Moving like a sexy-hexy wind-up doll, with the voice of a Jewish Chatty Cathy and the body of Salome, she gives the impression of being...