Word: merman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Clayton and Crooner Eddie Jackson. The trio played the Palace, appeared in a Ziegfeld revue, and provided the smash number for Cole Porter's 1930 musical, The New Yorkers. Other Broadway hits followed, including Porter's Red, Hot and Blue, which co-starred Bob Hope and Ethel Merman. It did not take long for Durante to get a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood. His first film, New Adventures of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1931), was written by Charles MacArthur...
...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...