Word: hootches
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White pinups have been replaced by black ones. One all-black hootch in Danang sports more than 500 such photographs. "I don't want any stringy-haired beast* broad on my wall. Black is beauty." In a Saigon "soul kitchen," blacks greet each other over spareribs and chittlins with 57 varieties of Black Power handshakes that may end with giving the receiver "knowledge" by tapping him on the head or vowing to die for him by crossing the chest, Roman legion style (see chart...
...Ciji Ware to choreograph the show. Unhappily, Act I has only one production number for Miss Ware to handle, so most of the hootchie-kootchie was left to the absent Mr. Graham-White to deal with; and his bad taste is consistent. I like as much kootch in my hootch as the next man, but there were moments when I felt myself compromised by what was going on up there. For one example, instead of having Stephen Canfield (Daniel Cheever), Ninotcha's American, merely kiss his frosty Russian, he has the two of them roll on the floor...
...existentialism when the tide of war ebbed from the Left Bank, like the Teddy Boys of postwar London posturing on street corners in their shabby pseudo-Edwardian finery like pathetic barnyard roosters, like the slack-jawed worshipers of Elvis Presley and their spiritual ancestors in the U.S., the hootch-swilling hellions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s, the truants of Japan have no place to run but away. Soon after the war, their restlessness was marked by a sharp spurt in juvenile delinquency. Today, after a brief respite, delinquency, violence and sex crimes among the young are once again...
Except for nice music. Pipe Dream is pretty much of a bust. It is so warm-hearted about a cold world, so high-minded about its lowlifes as to emerge mere hootch-coated butterscotch. Its bawdyhouse seems about as sinful as Saturday night in a Y.W.C.A.; when its mugs and molls carouse, what is meant to be lowdown seems more like a hoedown. And it is not just the madam who has a heart of gold; with all of its characters' hearts, Pipe Dream shows a positive Midas touch...
What makes the play ultimately unacceptable is not that it is often dull and even more often arty, but that it exposes decadence with decadent means. Lush and sensational, it uses its material as theatrical hootch; it spells out every sentence and then adds exclamation points. Causes are forgotten in the passion for effects; a vision of Hell dwindles into a Grand Guignol. Elia Kazan has directed the play vividly as a theater piece; he doubtless could not help adding glare to what cries out for shade...