Word: merriment
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...least unconsciously) by the viewers. Psychologists agree that people in audiences laugh aloud partly because they hear each other laughing. Therefore, for maximum enjoyment, the theory goes, the viewer alone or in small groups must get the feeling that he is in a crowd and free to join its merriment. A few sponsors have scoffed at the use of canned laughter, but the counterfeiters have had the last laugh. When Dear Phoebe jettisoned its laughter on the sponsor's orders two seasons ago, its ratings fell in the silence. Just to make sure, the advertising agency tried an experiment...
...beyond that, however much Guthrie's treatment discolors Shakespeare's play, it unifies it better than Shakespeare did. Some of Guthrie's inventions, rather than useful tools, are merely pretty toys; in general, he is too gaily farcical for Shakespeare's guilty merriment; and often, by smothering the words, he refuses to let Shakespeare speak for himself. Yet, though brightened, his Troilus is not bowdlerized: at the big moments Achilles is gangster enough, and Cressida (well played by lovely Rosemary Harris) enough of a bawd. Guthrie's Troilus is like a very free but very...
...hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling. At 1 o'clock one morning last week the stars winked out for the last time; the following night Roseland reopened in glittering new quarters, billed as "a magnificent metropolis of melody and merriment...
...knew from the beginning I didn't want to go back to small time. I never asked to do this show.''' In the true show-must-go-on spirit, ex-Hoofer Winchell went on as scheduled -if a touch subdued-next night, contributed to the merriment by goofing across the scene in an oversized fedora presented to him by a pair of guest stars...
...wagged a pair of aileron ears at the audience and wrapped his rubber legs around the lilt of a song. Ray Bolger, the greatest U.S. comic dancer and a veteran of 30 years in show business, was back at work in TV-and just in time to inject some merriment into TV's procession of tired clowns. In a $1,500,000 musical potpourri called Washington Square, a sentimental paean to Manhattan's self-consciously picturesque Greenwich Village, Hoofer Bolger is making his second attempt (his first live series) to win on TV the success he long...