Word: kismet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...there never been a philosophy of kismet, doubtless the theater would have invented one. For whatever its status as metaphysics, it makes a useful handmaiden for melodrama. And exploited, as in Tonight in Samarkand, with all the blare of circus music and color of circus life, it achieves for two acts a certain quality of nice old-fashioned excitement. The play goes in for few philosophic frills, merely uses fate as a plot gimmick. A blonde girl symbolizes death, but no more abstrusely than a headwaiter symbolizes dinner...
...American Theater Wing presented its annual Antoinette Perry awards ("Tonys"), Broadway's version of the Oscar. Chief recipients: for distinguished performances in dramatic plays-Audrey Hepburn*(Ondine) and David Wayne (Teahouse of the August Moon); best performances in musicals-Dolores Gray (Carnival in Flanders) and Alfred Drake (Kismet); outstanding director-Alfred Lunt (Ondine); outstanding play-Teahouse of the August Moon; outstanding musical-Kismet...
Productions have been known to survive lukewarm reviews (e.g., Wish You Were Here, Kind Sir, Kismet) and fail despite good reviews (Billy Budd, Take a Giant Step), but they are the exception rather than the rule. Some plays, which cost as much as $150,000 to bring to Broadway, have closed within a week because of bad reviews. When reviews are mixed, the play is on its own, but sometimes word-of-mouth and "names" can turn it into a hit such as Cole Porter...
...Kismet (Alfred Drake, Doretta Morrow and other members of the original cast; Columbia LP). A musical précis of the current Broadway idea of an Arabian night, featuring such popular songs as Baubles, Bangles and Beads, Stranger in Paradise and a couple of deft patter numbers. The music was culled from the work of Alexander Borodin, the 19th century Russian composer, by Robert Wright and George Forrest...
With a plot that requires virtually the entire population of Bagdad, including Omar Khayyam, Kismet casts Actor Drake as a resourceful poet who is, at different times, not only rich man, poor man, beggar man and thief, but also magician, prisoner, emir, and father of a beauteous maiden (Doretta Morrow) who wins the love of the caliph. Seldom has the path of true love run with so many detours, or so many halts to let caravans go by. Nor is the score notably helpful. Some eerie things have happened to Russian Composer Borodin's brilliantly eerie music, and though...