Word: pajama
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Target: the Funny Bone. Hip-flipper Verdon appeared on NBC's Colgate Variety Hour (Sun. 8 p.m., E.D.T.) in a salute to Songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who wrote the music for the Broadway hits The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Since Gwen was scheduled to do the numbers she originated in Damn Yankees, there was every reason to believe that she would prove as irresistible on TV as on Broadway. But her specialty is spoofing sex by seductively tossing her hips in all directions, while singing her songs. Although she aims chiefly at the funny bone...
...Verdon, whose dancing warms up this show onstage, duplicates the favor vocally for the record. It needs her. Except for the rowdy tune called Whatever Lola Wants (TIME, May 16). nothing quite matches the lines, written by the same team (Richard Adler-Jerry Ross), for last year's Pajama Game...
Damn Yankees (book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop; music & lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross) involves most of the team that turned out The Pajama Game. This time baseball is their target, and with pretty nearly as happy results. Under George Abbott's direction, there is a constant sense of zip, an occasional effect of explosion. There is plainly a belief that all music aspires toward a brass band's exuberance, all locomotion toward a fire engine's clanging speed. And there is a very proper belief that one Gwen Verdon is the equal...
Damn Yankees is less perfectly sustained than The Pajama Game; it slows down in places, or to keep fast, turns choppy. And it may disappoint people who find baseball a bore. For all others, however, the long jinx on baseball as a stage theme has been broken at last by the high jinks of a good, gay show...
...improvement in the composers' technique is the more careful weaving of sings into book. "There Once was a Man" and "Steam Heat" were show-stoppers no one would quarrel with, but they could claim no relevance to the pajama industry. Damn Yankees has a tight unity in all departments, the songs contribute to the action, and the action is weirdly plausible and even exciting. From "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," you may know the plot A middle-aged baseball fan sells his soul to the devil in order to become a young sports hero and rescues the Washington...