Word: joeys
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...Julian English, a doomed young member of the upper middle class, was a great success. O'Hara's career was truly launched. Novels like Butterfield 8, A Rage to Live and From the Terrace flowed from his restless typewriter. In 1940 he wrote the libretto for Pal Joey, an instant Broadway sensation. Though he got the National Book Award, he never won either the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize, to his unconcealed annoyance. "It used to hurt, never winning an award, but I've never been the pet of intellectuals," he said. His small Pennsylvania towns, like...
...birth of the modern Broadway musical is generally dated back to the early forties, when Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! introduced the idea of integrating songs and dances into a play. Up until that time, musicals were generally silly comedies or melodramas in which musical numbers, often irrelevant to the dramatized action, were used to bridge scenes. Richard Rodgers and his collaborators proved that these numbers could actually function as part of the play itself-enhancing characterizations, moving along the action, adding to dramatic impact and so forth. This was a revolutionary innovation...
...play opens endearingly with the two street kids grooving to a song called, "I walk the lonely streets at night/ A-looking' for your door." Murph and Joey discover the Indian mutely waiting for a bus. The kids wonder if he is an Indian or Turk and go through a series of delightful digs at each other, horseplay, and anecdotes such as the time Murph pulled down his trousers, sat on a Xerox machine, and sent the copies to his friends as Christmas cards. However, neither Heit nor Lazaro really got wound up in the roles. Horovitz is striving...
This time Horovitz came down hard on these themes. The boys discover the Indian's identification card and torture him with the possibility of calling his home. Joey is torn between sticking with his buddy Murph or saving the Indian from this cruelty. However, the conflict of this kind must be subtle, but is no more subtle than anything else in the play. The play occasionally smacked of the "East Side Gang," the only difference being its slight political edge...
...Joey chooses to side with Murph and pins down the Indian as Murph calls his son. The Indian is put on the phone, but to no avail, since Murph has cut the cord and stabbed his hand. The Indian is left reciting "Thank you," the only English words he knows, a receiver in one hand, a wound in the other. This time the play is much more to the point, a grotesque reminder that it is no more grotesque than what it documents. Why guerrilla theatre if it already happens on the streets...