Word: pal
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...Pal Joey (book by John O'Hara; music and lyrics by Rodgers & Hart) had turned-in the eleven years since it first opened on Broadway-into a kind of musicomedy legend. It had only to be revived there last week to emerge as a kind of musicomedy classic. John O'Hara's book remains brilliantly alive; Richard Rodgers' score is still delightfully fresh...
...very thing that gives Pal Joey its distinction-its unabashed look at sordid doings-may always disconcert the people for whom musicomedy means moonlight & roses, or at any rate does not mean blackmail and kept men. O'Hara's account of a small-time heel with his naive boasts and shameless buttering-up, and of the rich, man-eating tigress who loves him enough to keep him in style and stake him to a nightclub, but who coolly leaves him before he can leave her, is vividly hardboiled. For once, musicomedy plays with people rather than paper dolls...
...Pal Joey is perfect heel-&-toe stuff which, while carving up Joey, both creates and burlesques a raft of dance routines. What with the nightclub background, the second act possibly suffers from a take-off or so too many; but now as aforetimes Robert Alton's choreography has amazing liveliness, and the hoofing chorines are the jolliest bunch of girls in several seasons...
...John O'Hara's Pal Joey (music by Richard Rodgers), with Vivienne Segal, who also starred in the original 1940 cast...
...William Faulkner's Death Drag. But he has snagged some other good things: Anne Lindbergh reminisces about a weird Alaskan flight; Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes a Patagonian cyclone; and James Thurber, in his wonderful story, The Greatest Man in the World, draws a satiric profile of Pal Smurch, the cocky little urchin who flew nonstop around the world-the adulation went to his head so badly that he had to be pushed out the window...