Word: merman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Chevy Show, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore teamed up to put the imprint of their own engaging personalities on a repertory of ditties reminiscent of the enchanted evening when Mary Martin and Ethel Merman just pulled up a stool in front of the camera and sang some old songs...
When the show was first conceived, Ford executives asked: "Where are the people who sang Porter's songs on Broadway?" CBS had two answers: 1) Ethel Merman is rehearsing a new Broadway musical (Happy Hunting) and Mary Martin's heart belongs to NBC, and 2) the network hoped to avoid stirring up lingering memories. "We deliberately tried to stay away from nostalgia," said Executive Producer Jack Rayel, and "furthermore, a baritone who sang in a Porter show 20 years ago could not be compared with Gordon MacRae today in appeal...
...singing voices is particularly good, but none is bad. Most of the acting is quite adequate. Edith Adams and Peter Palmer fill the leads pleasantly, while Howard St. John's Bullmoose and Stubby Kaye's Marryin' Sam are amusing and refreshing. Although she shows traces of Ethel Merman and a witch from Macbeth, Charlotte Ray proves a good choice for Mammy Yokum. Pappy's role is properly squeaked by J. E. Marks...
...Broadway. The list ranges from the operatic Ballad of Baby Doe (TIME, July 16) to a musical adaptation of Voltaire's Candide by Lillian (The Little Foxes) Hellman, Conductor-Composer Leonard Bernstein and Poet Richard Wil bur. There are also such suggestions of enchanting evenings as Ethel Merman in Happy Hunting, with a book by Life With Father's Howard Lindsay-Russel Grouse; Li'l Abner, based on Al Capp's comic strip, with songs by Johnny Mercer; Pay the Piper by George (Damn Yankees, The Pa jama Game) Abbott, based on Eugene O'Neill...
Song & Dance. These unscheduled bits were topped with great helpings of pre-fabricated entertainment: trumpet-voiced Ethel Merman belting her show tunes through the rafters, Irving Berlin's trembling version of his own song, Ike for Four More Years, the pear-shaped tones of Nat "King" Cole's pop singing, the high reaches of the Met's Patrice Munsel, the stylized chitchat of Mutual's old-time Cinemactress Constance Bennett ("I don't feel well; I feel frazzled...