Word: hammerstein
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With A Month in the Country, the Phoenix Theater is in its third year as the most ambitious, most professional of the off-Broadway houses. While not rich, it has both means and know-how. Among its angels are Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lindsay & Grouse, Elia Kazan; among its actors have been Montgomery Clift, Nancy Walker, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Farley Granger, Maureen Stapleton; among its directors, John Houseman, Sidney Lumet, Tyrone Guthrie...
...Phoenix is aggressive eclecticism. Theater, say its producers, "means many things to many people. The minstrel show, tent show, vaudeville, Shakespearean repertory, newly discovered European playwrights, experiments in expressionism and constructivism, a platform for a social message. the magic of Irving Berlin and of Rodgers and Hart or Hammerstein musicals...
...there are plenty of good songs, many of them turned out by the old and not-so-very-old pros who stick close to Broadway-Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer. But the million-dollar "pops" that feed the gluttony of the nation's 550,000 jukeboxes, slip through the hands of its several thousand disk jockeys, and shake the walls of dormitories and rumpus rooms are written for the most part by little-known men. They are more familiar to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Income Tax Division, than...
...Molnar-Hammerstein plot, in particular, shows its greasepaint complexion on the screen. Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae) is a carnival pitchman, and what he pitches best of all is woo. Underneath his brattitude, of course, Billy is a real home-cookin' kid-just the sort of wild bull that really wants a wedding ring in his nose. And, of course, he gets one. He chases a fresh-faced little New England factory girl (Shirley Jones) so hard that she catches him. Billy has lost his carnival job, but he is too big a man to take work on a filthy...
...word: goo. And Director Henry King has chosen to smear it pretty thickly on the screen. Goo is, of course, a major ingredient of every Hammerstein libretto, but in Oklahoma!, for instance-even in the movie version, which starred the same two singers (TIME, Oct. 24)-the sentiment was cut with a dash of comic bitters. In this production the players play it so coy that they sometimes seem close to baby talk. Actor MacRae sings pleasantly, though, and so do Shirley Jones and Robert Rounseville...