Word: lowdownness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With its scarifyingly freakish weather, eerie sounds and collapsing houses, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy becomes at times a farcical free-for-all, as at other times it blares a propagandist freedom-for-no-one. Much of the writing, whether wrathful, lyrical or lowdown, has the true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts...
Playwright Kurnitz has a gift for amusing gags, and his play is sprinkled with hem. Here and there, it has a funny situation also; moreover, the manager beyond being show-stealingly played by Walter Matthau-is a juicy character, and not by accident. His rich, lowdown nature is right up Kurnitz' alley, which is Shubert with a touch of Tin Pan. In the world of music, as of art, Playwright Kurnitz remains Broadway to the core, He is not the only recent playwright whose treatment of a stylish professional world, by comparison with The Man Who Came to Dinner...
...long on pomp, short on circumstance. RCA Victor's Bonjour Tristesse, by French Composer Georges Auric-member of the sometime modernist group known as The Six*-offers the listener a deft American Express tour of the French psyche, is at its best when it cuts loose with some lowdown jazz...
...Satin Doll; Atlantic) almost completely without words. This could sound like a cat trapped in a rain barrel, but somehow manages not to. In the best of her all-but-wordless songs (the composer, Phil Moore, calls the technique "Woman-as-an-Instrument"), Carol fogs out three minutes of lowdown vowels, then wraps it up with wacky sexiness in a single phrase of explicit English: "Saved it all for you." Titles on the reverse side-Lying in the Hay, Keep on Doin' What You're Doin'-leave little doubt as to what it is all about...
...Tears, was doing well: "Only four weeks old, and that baby is hittin' between seven and eight hundred thousand." Fats talks the words in his songs, and they can be understood-a rarity among rock 'n' rollers. The lyrics are clean, but the beat is lowdown and as basic as they come. His head-rolling piano antics never sink to pelvis level...