Word: hoofer
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Ginger Rogers' precocity was not confined to her stage career. At eleven, she played a piano solo of MacDowell's To a Wild Rose in a Fort Worth auditorium. At 17, she married a vaudeville hoofer named Edward (Jack) Culpepper. Ginger left Culpepper three months later, divorced him, married Hollywood Actor Lew Ayres in 1935, separated from him the same year. At present unattached, she lives with her mother in the highest house on Beverly Crest, in Beverly Hills...
...year two Manhattan producers-Michael Todd and Alfred de Liagre Jr.-were planning separate swing productions of The Mikado on Broadway. When the Federal Theatre decided to bring its own production East, de Liagre bowed himself out, but Todd, charging WPA with obstructing private enterprise, accelerated his plans, engaged Hoofer Bill Robinson for the title role. Promptly the Federal Theatre closed its show in Chicago, last week opened it-three weeks ahead of Todd's-in Manhattan...
Luckily the leading parts are not so affected by Hollywood cutting as are some of the minor ones. Clark Gable, as the philosophical hoofer, Harry Van, gives one of the best performances of his career, since the part is ideally suited to his happy-go-lucky Americanism. Because she modeled her Russian Countess entirely too much on Lynn Fontanne's characterization, Norma Shearer is not so successful. Her Irene lacks the spontaneity of Gable's Harry Van. Yet with all its short-comings, "Idiot's Delight" is sustained by its immediacy of theme and powerful conflict of points of view...
Idiot's Delight (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Producer Hunt Stromberg's version of the play in which Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne delighted New York City theatre audiences three years ago. On the stage, Idiot's Delight presented the fragmentary romance between an itinerant U. S. hoofer and the fake-Russian mistress of a munitions maker, in an Italian border hotel on the eve of a European war. All this added up to an amusing and superficially penetrating indictment of totalitarian politics. Whenever Hollywood touches material of this sort, it stirs up a tremendous agitation about whether...
Baker made arrangements with the Theatre Guild and Alfred Lunt, chucked his lucrative radio work, took Idiot's Delight on tour. Hailed as a natural for the hoofer role, he got rave notices. But the show did poor business, wound up its brief tour last week $10,000 in the red.* "Ten thousand dollars." said Baker, who is returning to radio to recoup before taking another crack at the stage, "is more than it was worth...