Word: pandemonium
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Chest-Beater. The result was not, as might be expected, a kind of Spike Jones pandemonium, but gently exuberant, whimsical and thoroughly disciplined. Eddie Sauter and his partner Bill Finegan are running the most original band heard in the U.S. in years...
...described Beethoven's music as sounding like "the upsetting of bags of nails." Chopin's music was damned in its entirety by London's Musical World as "ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony." Tchaikovsky was assured by the Boston Evening Transcript that his new Fifth Symphony was "pandemonium, delerium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded." And Tchaikovsky himself was not above recording a terse opinion about Brahms: "That scoundrel . . . What a giftless bastard...
...sixth row center. In the second act, both the play and the playing take on considerably more life. There is some funny pantomime, notably of the producer and two of his associates wolfing their first square meal in days. But there is never the faintest approach to pandemonium; and though the third act is not, like the first, a fiasco, it is run-of-the-mine entertainment...
Even so, there is never a calm moment on the stage, nor many dull ones in the audience. To be sure, The Bat does no one thing very well-it never really horrifies, or mystifies, or amuses; there is profusion rather than skill, pandemonium rather than tension. But since, even in 1920, The Bat aimed at the funnybone as well as the spine, it would perhaps be a mistake to concentrate on one or the other now. What it could use is better acting: only Lucile Watson as the imperious spinster, and Zasu Pitts at moments as the maid...
...Tatum, 42, the old master of the swing era, and a pair of smooth-sounding sidemen riffed through Sweet Sue and Sweet Lorraine. His right hand rippled all over the keyboard, but the overall effect was one of sophistication rather than pandemonium...