Word: merricks
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...front pages and the late shows, he gleefully presents himself as the meanest man in town-as "the Abominable Showman," a bold, bad Broadway producer with a rubber leer, a big black Groucho Marx mustache and a tongue that can tirelessly slice baloney and burble ballyhoo about such Merrick productions as Look Back in Anger, La Plume de Ma Tante, Gypsy and Luther. To publicize his shows, Merrick with truly hippopotamic cheek has sent sandwich-board men into the streets of Manhattan encased in portable placarded pissoirs; persuaded President Johnson to accept the title tune of Hello, Dolly! (a Merrick...
Crocodiles & Bluebirds. To the trade, on the other hand, David Merrick is no mere figure of fun. He is a monster of rapacity, a genius of publicity, a wizard of organization who over the last decade has personified U.S. theater as no other man, not even Charles Frohman or Jake Shubert, has ever done before. In the 1965-66 season, his supremacy has been absolute. Out of 44 new shows presented on Broadway, Merrick produced only five. But of the season's dozen hits he came up with four: Marat/Sade, Inadmissible Evidence, Cactus Flower, Philadelphia, Here 1 Come...
Next season Merrick intends to give theatergoers plenty to think about: 1) a new play by Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade); 2) a musical based on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, written and directed by Abe Burrows; 3) a musical based on The Fourposter starring Mary Martin and directed by Gower Champion; 4) a new comedy by Bill Manhoff (The Owl and the Pussycat): 5) a new play by Brian Friel (Philadelphia, Here I Come!); 6) Hugh Wheeler's dramatization of the Shirley Jackson novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; 7) a play by Cartoonist Mell Lazarus...
...made. The plays I want, the people I want, are easier to get now. Every year I mean-to do more and better things. I keep having this fantasy. I'm walking through the theater district, and in every house I pass there is a David Merrick production. Whenever I doodle, I doodle only one word: SOON. I'll never stop working. It's the only thing I know. It's going to go on and on and on." And on, until the Dead-End Kid from St. Louis has kicked over the sign that says Broadway is a dead...
Healing & Dealing. Yet somehow, beset with profit fever, talent anemia, labor pains, galloping costitis and an acute customer deficiency, the Fabulous Invalid staggers into her spurious finery every fall. And somehow she manages to last the winter. If a cure is possible, Merrick has not found it. Yet in a spectacular series of operations that involve both healing and dealing, cutting throats and cauterizing abuses, he has contrived to keep the patient above-ground and to generate a genuine hope that U.S. theater can eventually get back on its-well, anyway, on its two left feet. That hope, David Merrick...