Word: merman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Maybe it's just just me; maybe lots of heterosexuals born since World War II really do love musicals. But I have never knowingly hummed a show tune. I take it only on faith that Rodgers and Hammerstein were geniuses. Ethel Merman's voice was powerful, sure, and powerfully annoying. Each new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical seems like an ice show putting on airs, Siegfried and Roy with bathos. To a majority of people under 50, I'm convinced, the formal conceit of musicals (a so-so play during which the actors inexplicably sing their hearts out every 10 minutes...
Most ruinous, title actress Kathryn Zaremba, a nine-year-old from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is loud and clear but never vulnerable or soft -- she's like Ethel Merman at her brassiest, without the compensating musicality, rather than a cuddlesome child. By the end there's hardly a wet eye in the house...
...Dumbo, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, a rabbit, a dinosaur, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert De Niro, a stewardess, a bashful sheep, Pinocchio, a magician, a Jean Gabin-style Frenchman, Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid, Arsenio Hall, a finicky tailor, Walter Brennan, a TV parade host and hostess, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a bee, a U- boat, a one-man band and a quartet of cheerleaders. Many of these apparitions show up in the Cab Callowayish A Friend like Me, a showstopper in which the Genie displays his awesome versatility...
Here the Porter treasures range from the composer's tart, crisply enunciated delivery of Anything Goes to Gertrude Lawrence's lascivious rendition of The Physician. Some choices bow, gratifyingly, to the obvious. Ethel Merman trumpets Blow, Gabriel, Blow; Fred Astaire croons Night and Day; and Mary Martin purrs her way through My Heart Belongs to Daddy. But more interesting are the unexpected matches and offbeat finds. Marion Harris, a now forgotten star, strikes a provocative balance of plaintive charm and rhythmic sophistication in a 1930 recording of You Do Something to Me. For Miss Otis Regrets, Ethel Waters' well-known...
While TV is likely to beckon, Prince insists, "The musical is my art form." Shows will surely be written for her. Until then, shows that were written for Merman, Rosalind Russell and the other great ladies should be brought out of mothballs. One longs to see Prince in Mame, in Gypsy, in Annie Get Your Gun. For her, Guys and Dolls is probably just the first milestone on a voyage of Golden Age rediscovery...