Word: merman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cannot keep this recording of the musical adaptation of The Fourposter from sounding like a commercial for twin beds ANNIE GET YOUR GUN (RCA Victor) his original-cast album of the 1966 Lincoln Center revival compares favorably with original version of 20 years ago (still available on Decca). Ethel Merman's voice may have lost a little of its spring, but it still isn't rusty, and the high-caliber orchestra of the Victor recording makes the Decca sound like a pop pistol...
...Roman of them all, and he plays the conniving lead, Pseudolus, with deadly timing, a rubber face, a protean voice, and a Stoic endurance of pratfalls. His is a virtuoso performance, and at one point his delivery of a line stops the show cold. When he sings, there is Merman in his voice, or Rudy Vallee, or whatever will milk a laugh from a lyric. What he can't do with his voice, he does with body English, wiggles, or Cossack leaps...
...Manhattan's most noted nightclub and for half that time le plus chic; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. A bootlegger in the '20s, Billingsley opened the Stork in 1929, coddled columnists and flattered the famous. Walter Winchell publicized the joint, Brenda Frazier brought her friends, Ethel Merman came with the show folks (and got a diamond bracelet inscribed "From Sherm to Merm"); pretty girls, famous or not, got gifts of perfume, gold Stork keys, jeweled compacts. In the '50s, arrogance at the door and labor troubles in the kitchen signaled the end that the discotheques finally...
Stealing Second Base. Continental's celerity is largely the work of its longtime (since 1938) President Robert Forman Six, a onetime merchant seaman who built the airline up from a puddle jumper. Six, 58, is a theatrical sort whose three marriages-to a California socialite, Actresses Ethel Merman and Audrey Meadows, his present wife-created a standard gag at Continental: "Bob is batting .500. Three for Six." With a flair for gaudy promotion, he has equipped his golden-tailed jets with golden toilet seats. His public-relations men once hired two dozen dwarfs, dressed them in golden space suits...
Named Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year, Ethel Merman has "the proudest and happiest day of my life." Master Chalmers begins a charmingly scholastic discussion about the meaning of "substantial" by writing that it "obviously must remain a relative term until the Dean has at least some idea of how many letters he will receive." Dean Monro replies that he will neither count letters nor define the word, and hints that Harvard may want to eliminate all student choice in the assignment process, anyway...