Word: merman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Broadway's trumpet-voiced Ethel Merman, who will play a party-throwing lady diplomat in a forthcoming musical (Call Me Madam), showed up an hour and 40 minutes late for a dinner engagement with party-throwing Perle Mesta, U.S. Minister to Luxembourg. Reported Ethel afterwards: "We wound up with our arms around each other, yak-yaking to beat the band. A real swell dame...
...please that she threatens to carry it too far. She plunges into her first two numbers like a bronco out of a rodeo pen, filling the screen with so much motion that it is hard to listen for the words-and impossible to ignore the singer. She lacks Ethel Merman's craftiness with comedy, but along with her unbridled vitality, she gives the role something that brassy Ethel Merman never attempted: she kindles the love story with poignancy, makes it seem something more sincere than a musicomedy plot. In a slow, sentimental number like They...
Impatient but determined, Betty had prayed, pleaded and plotted for the role of Annie from the time she saw Ethel Merman do it in the 1946 Broadway hit. She never doubted she would get it, even after M-G-M outbid Paramount, her home studio, for the film rights. With Judy Garland cast in the lead and shooting already begun, Betty still insisted on betting an M-G-M executive that she would play the part...
...heady night for the stage-struck-almost all of the 300-odd guests at the opening-night party at Manhattan's Hotel St. Regis. Some of them were towering eminences whose very names are magical incantations along Broadway: Noel Coward, Ethel Merman, Gilbert Miller, Lily Pons, Billy Rose. Mingling among the great and irradiated by their greatness were the humble and the hopeful-chorus girls and boys from the new show, stagehands and bit players. As Meyer Davis' orchestra blared forth the insistent rhythms of Irving Berlin's Show Business ("There's NO bus'ness...
...nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business. In 1938 an impish little brunette named Mary Martin took New York by storm one night when she sang a song called My Heart Belongs to Daddy. In 1930 Ethel Merman stood in front of the footlights in Manhattan's Alvin Theater, bellowed Gershwin's I Got Rhythm in a voice like a fire siren, and blew the audience right out of its seats. Before her, a gawky torch singer named Fanny Brice and a twinkle-toed dancer named...