Word: jolson
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MANDY PATINKIN: MANDY PATINKIN (CBS). The Broadway (Sunday in the Park with George) and movie (Alien Nation) actor lets fly with a fearlessly melodramatic song cycle chosen from sources as various as Stephen Sondheim and Al Jolson. Some are a bit florid, but the best tunes (like Anyone Can Whistle) have a delicacy that lingers...
...embarrassing reminder that overseas investments must be made with care. In 1985 the Manhattan-based company bought 50% of Hawley & Hazel Chemical, a Hong Kong firm that has long sold a popular toothpaste in Southeast Asia. The only problem: the toothpaste package bore the smiling blackface image of Al Jolson, and the product's name was Darkie...
...masks"? He could have even included Gene Kelly or, generically, the Black minstrel show era. NO, these other variations on the them don't have the punch when you want to intimate, subconsciously perhaps, that a Jewish singer indulged in a form of entertainment not generally considered demeaning in Jolson's time...
...Charles, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon were some of his contemporaries, but the singer who really knocked Jackie Wilson out was Al Jolson. Jackson may dance like Baryshnikov straddling a jackhammer, move like a street blood steeped in Astaire and t'ai chi, sing like an angel on a soul-food bender, but a fair portion of his personal taste and his musical inspiration comes from the sort of glitzy places where soul seldom strays. One of his favorite things is My Favorite Things, sung by Julie Andrews, raindrops on roses, warm woolen mittens and all. He loves...
...little humor or ribbing of Newman, the liberal who lives in an East Side Manhattan apartment, a country place in Connecticut and a home in Beverly Hills could have washed down that goo. Your story reminded me of Zelda Fitzgerald's remark to Ernest Hemingway upon seeing Al Jolson, "Don't you think he's greater than Jesus...