Word: patters
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...better-known Savoy Operas, the Civic Light Opera Company has learned to be lusty in choruses, whimsical in patter-songs, and sentimental in arias. They can shake the deck of the good ship "Pinafore," snapping their fingers at a foeman's taunts, along with their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Or, transformed into Pirates, they can sally forth to seek their prey and help themselves in a royal way. But as Gondolieri, whose life is "loving and laughing and quipping and quaffing," they miss the right note of delicate gayety. They sing "Buon' giorno, signorine!" like the police...
William Danforth, lately stopped from the Mikado's throne, strode about in the mock-gloom of a black cape and hat, hissing patter-songs between his teeth, or bellowing out a sinister line a quartertone flat, to make your blood run cold...
...such a breeze with his furious fanning that he all but blows himself into the wings. He takes frequent encores by singing the most irreverent variations on the text, translating "The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring, Tra-La" into every dialect but the Scandinavian. He expands the patter-song "I've Got a Little List" to include the more recent nuisances. Even in Gilbert's day this song was progressively altered to include the passing parade of follies, such as the "scorching bicyclist" and the "lovely suffragist; so that for his inclusion of the "megaphonic crooner" and the "prohibitionist...
During the first few days of the National Tennis championship at Forest Hills (L. I.), spectators more knowing than those who come later in the week stroll about among the outside courts, comparing notes on familiar players, making a patter of applause that punctuates the cool syncopation of tennis balls bouncing against turf and strings. There was plenty of material for sideline talk last week. Ellsworth Vines Jr., defending his championship, and Henri Cochet, keyed to avenge the beating Vines gave him at Roland Garros stadium, had first-round byes. . . . Bunny Austin, England's No. i player, wearing...
...WATER - P. G. Wodehouse - Doubleday, Doran. Like Amos 'n' Andy, Charles Dickens and other classics, Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse some time ago began to pay the penalty of fame. His patter still amuses but its pattern is growing a thought too familiar. Not that Author Wodehouse never uncorks anything new. Hot Water, his latest offering, shows him a keen student of U. S. vaudeville gags, funny sheets, Walter-Winchellisms. It is a tribute to his skill as a merciless horser of musi-comedy scenes, dialog and situation that he is still able to raise many a horse laugh...