Word: lahr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FOXY dogsleds Bert Lahr up to the 1890s Yukon, and from there on the evening is fool's gold, a bonanza of comic Lahrgesse...
Foxy transports Broadwayites to an antic, 1890s Yukon, where all the fool's gold is stashed in the pouches under Bert Lahr's eyes. When Lahr crosses those eyes, the showdown is eyeball-to-eyeball. When he rolls them deliriously around the socket rims, he looks like a pixilated squirrel who has forgotten where last summer's nuts are buried...
Never has a pinkie been crooked with more elaborate Lahr-di-da, or sexagenarian toes been more agile in the choreography of cowardice. In one panic, Lahr scrambles halfway up the proscenium arch and hangs there, glaring down in 20-foot-high dudgeon at the scoundrels who have treed him. Throughout the musical, he emits those lecherous gurgles, dying squawks and goosy yelps that used to be the cheek-in-tongue counterpoint to vaudeville, and burlesque. What makes Lahr the king of clowns is, above all, his masterly word-and-action timing, as when he off-handedly tosses...
Chocolate-covered ham is the prevailing flavor of Foxy, which borrows its name and some threads of plot from Ben Jonson's Volpone. Double-crossed by three rascally pals, Prospector Lahr gets his revenge by pretending that he is at death's door, with a fortune in nuggets to bestow. His greedy victims vie desperately with one another to show their love for Lahr. One of the sourdoughs, after snapping up a comely virgin for $33,000 on the Yukon's bullish bride market, even offers Bert the jus primae noctis. As for the gift, red-haired...
Except for Talk to Me, Baby ("Tell me lies, lies, lies"), Robert Emmett Dolan's score is rather do-re-mealy for Johnny Mercer's lyrics, which are at their cleverest in Bon Vivant, delivered by Lahr impersonating a British peer with mauve tweeds and a stiff upper lisp. In fact, without Bert Lahr's vintage hokum, Foxy would be earthbound, not mirthbound...