Word: mirthfulness
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Other items of interest in the assortment are playbills of the 1850s advertising for "respectable young men to act as auxiliaries," stage directions for the audience advising theatre-goers to greet the play with "shouts of applause" and "appropriate outbursts of mirth," and exhortations to actresses saying with all the correctness of an English Aa student, "Ladies, if you smoke do so in private-as we do not want...
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth...
...Drake portrays Barnaby Goodchild, a legendary rake who keeps American singing for 300 years, and not entirely free from interference. Before the play is over, Puritan ministers, Civil War top sergeants, Gay Nineties park policemen, and navy lieutenant commanders are doing their best to stop Barnaby from spreading musical mirth as he romps through America's history...
...necessary. He got a court injunction to stop the threatened sale until his case is heard. Almost as important, the injunction also removed from the club the mustached custodian and his three men who kept their eyes fixed on the cash register, and were gen erally a deterrent to mirth and gaiety...
There is just one reservation to all this praise for the show at the Colonial: go to it willing to laugh. The play is a comedy and, like much of James Thurber's work, cannot be taken seriously. But, after the laughter and the mirth, remember it in seriousness, for it represents a condemnation of American middle-class life almost as damaging as that of Thurber. It isn't as bitter or as obvious, but it's there just the same...