Word: kaufmans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Front Row Center (Wed. 10 p.m., CBS). Dinner at Eight, the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber stage and screen hit, starring Pat O'Brien, Mary Astor...
Silk Stockings (music & lyrics by Cole Porter; book by George S. Kaufman Leueen MacGrath and Abe Burrows) spent three spotlighted months on the road pitching things out and patching things up. It will probably spend many months longer on Broadway. The reason is not that it offers anything unusual in the way of merit or novelty; it seems almost frightened of anything distinguished. The reason lies rather in a formula professionalism, a kind of glazed mediocrity, a persisting common touch that, here and there, is a touch too common. Silk Stockings is all Main Stem and no flower...
...press sensationalism with a few vaudeville routines and technical novelties, and the rave reviews are as good as written. You play is sure to run at least a year on Broadway--and perhaps two, if your technique is as polished as that of Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman, authors of The Solid Gold Cadillac...
Messrs. Teichmann and Kaufman have not confined their wit to one vein or aimed it at one specific target. Early in the evening, for example, they cast out a few promising barbs at the monopolistic tendencies of "free enterprise," but they choose not to linger here, and immediately move on to the subject of Senate investigations, and then to the foibles of the press, and from there to the proxy system of stock-voting. Meanwhile, they have thrown in such diverse gimmicks as a recorded narration, fairly-tale style, by Fred Allen; a slapstick routine of an executive doing...
This diversity of comic elements, in the hands of other playwrights, could certainly lead to chaos. Indeed, even Teichmann and Kaufman have over-reached themselves in the girdle episode, which, besides being irrelevant, is largely unfunny. But on the whole, Cadillac's material stays admirably cohesive. The authors may be using a shotgun instead of a rifle, but their target is the large one of sustained humor rather than the pin-point of specific ridicule. And the laughs are constant all evening...