Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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King Sextimus (Jack Gilford) is a Harpo Marxist mute with whom no 15th century lady in waiting is more than half safe. Queen Agravaine (Jane White) is a jawing virago for whom possession is nine-tenths of motherhood's law. It begins to look as if their son, poor fretful Prince Dauntless (Joe Bova), will always be mama's boy. And then one day Princess Winnifred (Carol Burnett) swims the moat. Winnifred ("My friends call me 'Fred' ") rescues Dauntless from his possessive mother, but only after Fred's friends have built up the queen...
...youngest ballerina, 19-year-old Ekaterina Maximova. Unfortunately, the dancers' technique was more impressive than their material: among the selections was a glass-beaded resurrection of Walpurgis Night, from Gounod's Faust, with the satyrs decked out in yellow wigs that made each a dead ringer for Harpo Marx...
Person to Person: Professionally mute Harpo Marx talked so freely before air time that Host Ed Murrow playfully opened the show with: "I hope it's not your intention to monopolize the conversation this evening." It was not. On the air, Harpo ogled the camera with idiot grins and adroit grimaces, whistled replies between his fingers, blew smoke bubbles at Murrow and sadly plucked at his harp. But, in the lifelong tradition of "inviolable mutism." he was noisily silent. Tumbling over the furniture in his Palm Springs home, fright-wigged Harpo was as much a problem to chatty...
Murrow. Trying to give viewers an insight into Harpo's more serious side, she explained: "Actually he is a very quiet man, philosophical. He uses his head." Behind her back, the camera caught 64-year-old Harpo standing on his head in the middle of the room...
Richard Waring's dupable Cassio is convincing. But it is a mistake for him to be clean-shaven, since Iago makes a pointed reference to his beard. As the love-sick, not-too-bright Roderigo, Richard Easton indulges in the right amount of humor, even incorporating a few Harpo Marxian mannerisms. He properly appears with clean face at the beginning of the play; but, after Iago tells him to disguise his baby-face and increase the manliness of his appearance with "an usurped beard," he should of course don false whiskers for the rest of the drama...