Word: merman
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Last week, NBC (which had lost almost all of its comedy line-up to raiding CBS) launched a female counterattack with The Ethel Merman Show (Sun. 9:30 p.m., E.D.T.). The program's tenuous story line has dark, bouncy, 41-year-old Ethel Merman, ably assisted by ex-Juvenile Star Leon Janney, trying to sell a new revue to a somnolent backer-Homer Tubbs, the Syracuse floor-mop king...
Dead Cherokee. Essentially, the show is a platform for the display of Merman's singing voice, which ranges from a 100-proof whisper to a strident bellow, her theater-born gift of timing, and her immaculately correct intonation for every funny line. With this bristling arsenal, Ethel puts starch into the feeblest jokes; her rowdy, slam-bang personality is nearly as full-bodied on the air as it was in such Broadway smashes a Annie Get Your Gun, Something for the Boys and Du Barry Was a Lady...
...sides of Porter's life-show business and the high-living, high-gloss international society that lionized him long before his songs caught the public's ear. Between opening nights, Porter shuttles back & forth on a more or less rigid timetable between the greasepainted world of Ethel Merman and the gilded, brittle world of Elsa Maxwell...
...voice, which he has described as unpleasant. To see that justice was done his work, he spent hours last week hovering over Columbia recording sessions at which the orchestra and principals of Kiss Me, Kate worked on an album of the score. (One of his favorite performers is Ethel Merman, who has played in some of his biggest hits, Anything Goes, Du Barry Was a Lady, Something for the Boys, because, as she puts it, "I can boff out those lines the way he wants them.") New singers know better than to risk trying out for Porter by singing...
Jaakko will get a lineup on his freshman mile relay squad, as well as another look at his varsity, in the course of the evening. Yearlings Eddie Turtzner, John Packard, Tom McGrath, and Ronnie Merman will be running, and Mikkola sees the chief trouble coming from the Yale and Dartmouth '52 squads...