Word: kat
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...where his grandfather would shake his lantern at lightning and dare God to strike him down. But it was Lowell, Mass., where he was born and raised, that enraptured Kerouac. It was the whole lost prewar world of Friday-night beers, Saturday ball games, dips in the brook, Krazy Kat, horror movies and 1930's popular culture. There was also football. Kerouac was a talented running back, in high school and at Columbia, where he dropped the game in favor of the literary life...
After a rather tepid Krazy Kat cartoon and a razzle-dazzle rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that shouldn't be missed--technicolor psychedelics, sing-along sub-titles, and a flag with the wrong number of stars--we arrive in the Big City, which is probably Los Angeles but could be anyplace. Here the Tramp criss-crosses paths with the beautiful girl and the eccentric millionaire. She thinks that Chaplin must be wealthy as well as kind--after all, she's heard him getting out of a limousine. Smitten by love, he can't bring himself to explain that...
...their thoughts to each other whenever that plot hit a crucial junction--it also introduced seemingly non-integrated throwaway numbers that commented on the plot rather than advance it. It all looked innocent enough--since Sally Bowles, the play's heroine, sings in a sleazy Berlin nightclub, the Kit Kat Klub, it was only natural that the musical would utilize some of the numbers she would have sung on the job. The effect, however, proved far more insidious...
...Kat Klub--underneath its rouged and mascaraed exterior--possesses a knowing intelligence in the character of its Master of Ceremonies--as played by Joel Grey, a wicked little man who as readily agrees to pinch-hit as a chorus girl in drag as he assumes the role of death's subaltern on earth, doing both with a manic enthusiasm that belongs only to the dying and damned. With Grey's M.C. on hand, the conventional half of Cabaret was never even in the running...
...musical numbers by John Kander and Fred Ebb are diluted Kurt Weill and far too numerous. The actors, how ever, are all good. Along with a chorus of sclerotic voluptuaries, Joel Grey as the Kit Kat M.C. puts the cabaret acts across with captivating vulgarity...