Word: showman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Barroom baritone: slightly off key. Choice of material: boyhood favorites. Yet Old Showman Joe Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, won raves from the audience attending his professional singing debut last week at a Manhattan cabaret called the Ballroom. "I'm making a public display of myself at this stage of my life," Papp, 57, began. Then he whipped out a top hat and cane and even mouthed a harmonica. After the finale and a flurry of roses at his feet, the star collapsed in his dressing room and sighed: "I could act Hamlet easier than this...
...European past. The book contained a photograph of a bearded Kenyatta carrying a spear and wearing a blue monkey cloak slung over his shoulder?all fabricated to make him look more like a tribal elder than a Western student. He was, as British Author Elspeth Huxley once observed, "a showman to his fingertips...
DIED. Henry Trefflich, 70, the "Monkey King," who for 45 years imported wild animals to the U.S.; in Bound Brook, NJ. A flamboyant showman, Trefflich built a million-dollar-a-year business selling exotic creatures from his four-story Lower Manhattan menagerie to scientists, moviemakers and carnival hucksters. Among his sales: Tarzan's chimp Cheetah and the monkeys used in breakthrough Rh (rhesus) factor research. Occasionally a restless snake would escape from Trerflich's store; once 100 monkeys created harmless havoc on Wall Street and made the headlines. Trefflich claimed the escape was accidental; skeptics abounded...
...extending good will?"); sidelong irony ("Betrayed by a kiss/ On a cool night of bliss/ In the valley of the missing link"); even a certain smarmy desperation ("I'm lost in the haze of your delicate ways"). In live appearances, Dylan has lately converted himself into a sardonic showman, tossing around patter between numbers, glad-handing the audience, carrying on as if he wants to bellyflop straight into the mainstream. Street-Legal has strong pop overtones, and at least two cuts (Baby Stop Crying and We Better Talk This Over) sound shaped for the Top Ten. Dylan...
Margaret Drabble is not a Zen guru, a panderer, or a showman. She is a novelist. She does what the writer-as-artist can do better than anyone else: dig down to the truth of our inner lives and make it visible. The Ice Age is convincing evidence that, like England, the novel in modern times is not really dying, but undergoing a strange metamorphosis, from which it yet may rouse itself "like a strong man after sleep...