Word: merman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Sylva). First show in four years to charge $7.70 on opening night (with seats being scalped at $50 and $75 a pair), Du Barry Was a Lady swept into Manhattan last week with a tremendous advance build-up and the virtually golden guarantees of Cole Porter, Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman...
...Barry Was a Lady is all there. Its costumes are gorgeous, its goings-on boisterous. Its wit is almost nil, but its wisecracks are raw as a cannibal sandwich, suggestive as a red light burning in the hall. Bert Lahr is at his best-which is good enough. Ethel Merman is at her best -which is tops...
Bert Lahr is at his best when he goes royal, wrinkling his sub-Bourbon nose and speaking French as though afraid it might bounce back and hit him. As for Ethel Merman, if she is a little less than kin to Du Barry, she is more than kind-makes her, in fact, the most likable royal trollop that ever pranced behind footlights. More of an 18th-Century tomboy than a glamor girl, Merman booms and torches away in her train-announcer's contralto, jouncing her personality all over the stage, giving the King the oo-la-lahr, then...
There's a mighty favorable rate of exchange at the Shubert this week, where "DuBarry Was a Lady" is the attraction. You put down your money and you get a Cole Porter revue, costumed, syncopated, gagged, and sexed up to the hilt. Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr perform in their best manner, with everything from the fake marble walls of a night-club men's room to the tufted satin of Louis XV's court as settings. Their special brand of humor seems even funnier when its spice is set off against the elegance of the French court...
...clothes; in fact, during the French court scenes, she has to wear a hoop skirt. Such superfluous drapery is the worst sort of nuisance to this particular bundle of joy, for gentlemen, those pictures you've seen don't lie. She provides the visual stimulus, while Ethel Merman tickles the erotic funnybone. Ethel could put over a song to a deaf mute and teach the facts of life to a Trappist monk by gestures alone. And also, there's Bert Lahr, who seems to have brought the Lahr leer to a new stage of perfection, for not a scene...