Word: merman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...part, deserves such a show--one would be pressed to find three stage personalities as obnoxious as Brian McCue, Grace Shohet, and Fred Barton. With his pinched face and short catalogue of exaggerated expressions, McCue mugs like an eight-year old who wants a new tricycle; Shohet evokes Ethel Merman; Barton, the ham-handed piano player, thinks it's enough to bellow in a smug voice and grin idiotically like George Burns, jutting his prognathous jaw like a salient into the Comic Void...
...times she even enlists the original performers: Ethel Merman belts Anything Goes and Gemze de Lappe dances Oklahoma!'s dream ballet as if these shows had never closed. Bobby Van and Bernadette Peters, who were not born when Good News opened, summon up the sentimental performing style of the '20s so well that their rendition of The Best Things in Life Are Free is surprisingly touching. There is also an unexpectedly fine turn from John Davidson, whose Vegas slickness dissipates when he leads the chorus in Oklahoma! Only Carol Burnett and Sandy Duncan disappoint: their broad delivery blunts...
Kaye's enthusiastic narration packs in as many anecdotes as possible. She describes Rodgers' legendary composing speed (ten minutes for Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin') and nudges Merman into an unflattering reminiscence of Porter's voice ("He sang like a hinge"). With the aid of Choreographer Agnes de Mille, Kaye re-creates the excitement kindled by Oklahoma!, the first musical to integrate all its songs into a story. A few of Kaye's points are debatable. She sweepingly dismisses rock musicals, even though rock is not necessarily incompatible with musical theater. (Indeed, the Beatles sang...
DIED. Guy Bolton, 96, grand old man of the Broadway musical who, with his fellow Englishman P.G. Wodehouse, wrote the books for shows with tunes by George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern; in London. Bolton collaborated on works that were vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence (Oh, Kay!), Ethel Merman (Anything Goes) and Fred Astaire (Lady, Be Good!), as well as the recently revived Very Good Eddie...
...tuna-melt sandwiches and hot-fudge sundaes. Maybe part of the extra attention was also due to some special parental intuition that their youngest was the most gifted of the brood. At six, Johnny was off visiting Sister Ellen in a road company of Gypsy. "He'd mouth all Merman's songs from the records," she remembers, "and he could dance every part." When he was nine, he got his first part in a local workshop production of Who'll Save the Plowboy? A retrospective appreciation from Mom: "He had only two or three lines, but he said them...