Word: minstreling
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Like most of Gilbert's plots, the Mikado is filled with strange twists and stranger characters. There is the wandering minstrel who is actually of the royalty, the old maid with an "irresistable right elbow," the axeman who can't stand the thought of head-chopping, and the bureaucrat who fills most every job in town, including officially checking up on his own corruption. This fellow, the Lord High Everything, is the best of the show, delightfully played by Thomas Whitbread. He is perfectly pompous, and his gift of timing makes even mundane lines amusing...
...guiding principle of the Phoenix is aggressive eclecticism. Theater, say its producers, "means many things to many people. The minstrel show, tent show, vaudeville, Shakespearean repertory, newly discovered European playwrights, experiments in expressionism and constructivism, a platform for a social message. the magic of Irving Berlin and of Rodgers and Hart or Hammerstein musicals...
...emotionally explosive issue. But the surprise is that so many editors are now willing to stick their necks out. It is only about ten years since newspapers in the South began in any numbers to break such old habits as depicting the Negro only as a criminal or a minstrel end man, and learning such new ones as calling him "Mr."-a practice still far from universal. Only in the same short period have Southern papers started to drop the tag "Negro" in stories unless it is pertinent, and to run more news of the Negro engaged in constructive activity...
...nights he pored over books "on how to become a $5,000-a-year man." After a short-lived job with a druggists' syndicate, Marx stumbled "by sheer happenstance" into an office-boy's job with Ferdinand Strauss, whose Zippo the Climbing Monkey and Alabama Coon Jigger (a clockwork minstrel) were the first mechanical toys mass-manufactured in the U.S. Within four years, Marx had been promoted to manage the company's East Rutherford, NJ. plant, and soon afterward he had his first idea for a toy. One of Strauss's products was a toy horn that bleated "Mamma, Papa...
...brothers Louis and Dave started in to make toys themselves. They bought the dies for Zippo and the Coon Jigger after Strauss had gone bankrupt. The monkey and the minstrel had been on the market for more than 20 years, but Marx gave them bright new colors, brought out bigger models, and sold 8,000,000 of each. By the time he was 26, Marx was a millionaire and convinced that, in the toy industry, there is nothing new under the sun. To prove his point, he brought Zippo back this year, redesigned, rechristened (Jocko) and repriced...